Another lie debunked-Africans did nothing before the white man

[MizMolly]

Our arguments are supported by the facts we have shown to your face. The fantasy is your argument. Well actually it's more like a delusion. You've been shown that everything you have believed in your life is a lie. Instead of accepting the facts, you want to flail and kick like a 3 year old when it's told it can't have something. Your entire life has been fake news son.

More propaganda and bullshit. The only reason they died is because they didnt want the south to start enslaving white men. If they were so worried about Black people being free why did they allow slavery to still exist in the north?

Hmmm....Slavery did not exist in the Northern States...at the time of the Civil War. I doubt any whites were worried about being enslaved..perhaps you could shoot me a link from that time bemoaning the possibility? I will note that the shameful Dred/Scot decision did recognize the right for Southern slave-owners to pursue their "property" all the way to the Canadian border.

Dred Scott

"The decision of the court was read in March of 1857. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney -- a staunch supporter of slavery -- wrote the "majority opinion" for the court. It stated that because Scott was black, he was not a citizen and therefore had no right to sue. The decision also declared the Missouri Compromise of 1820, legislation which restricted slavery in certain territories, unconstitutional.

While the decision was well-received by slaveholders in the South, many northerners were outraged. The decision greatly influenced the nomination of Abraham Lincoln to the Republican Party and his subsequent election, which in turn led to the South's secession from the Union.

Peter Blow's sons, childhood friends of Scott, had helped pay Scott's legal fees through the years. After the Supreme Court's decision, the former master's sons purchased Scott and his wife and set them free.

Dred Scott died nine months later."

A lot of the troops on the Northern side hated slavery..and thought the blacks were totally inferior. They hated the Institution---that's all. Some for religious reasons..some economic...some ethical...some because they were told to by the media of the day. Many of the Northern soldiers were Irish immigrants..who were as racist as the day is long..but they were drafted..so they had no choice-they fought. Most soldiers don't fight for great causes..they fight for their buddy next to them..and to not seem a coward.

With a handful of exceptions...everyone of that time was racist by our standard....even the advocates for Emancipation

There were still slaves in the north. Not many, but some. They were grandfathered as part of the freeing of slaves in the north.

Indentured servitude was slavery. Just a type that you could buy your way out of. Many never did.

I have read that indentured servants were treated horribly.

 

[westwall]

Our arguments are supported by the facts we have shown to your face. The fantasy is your argument. Well actually it's more like a delusion. You've been shown that everything you have believed in your life is a lie. Instead of accepting the facts, you want to flail and kick like a 3 year old when it's told it can't have something. Your entire life has been fake news son.

More propaganda and bullshit. The only reason they died is because they didnt want the south to start enslaving white men. If they were so worried about Black people being free why did they allow slavery to still exist in the north?

Hmmm....Slavery did not exist in the Northern States...at the time of the Civil War. I doubt any whites were worried about being enslaved..perhaps you could shoot me a link from that time bemoaning the possibility? I will note that the shameful Dred/Scot decision did recognize the right for Southern slave-owners to pursue their "property" all the way to the Canadian border.

Dred Scott

"The decision of the court was read in March of 1857. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney -- a staunch supporter of slavery -- wrote the "majority opinion" for the court. It stated that because Scott was black, he was not a citizen and therefore had no right to sue. The decision also declared the Missouri Compromise of 1820, legislation which restricted slavery in certain territories, unconstitutional.

While the decision was well-received by slaveholders in the South, many northerners were outraged. The decision greatly influenced the nomination of Abraham Lincoln to the Republican Party and his subsequent election, which in turn led to the South's secession from the Union.

Peter Blow's sons, childhood friends of Scott, had helped pay Scott's legal fees through the years. After the Supreme Court's decision, the former master's sons purchased Scott and his wife and set them free.

Dred Scott died nine months later."

A lot of the troops on the Northern side hated slavery..and thought the blacks were totally inferior. They hated the Institution---that's all. Some for religious reasons..some economic...some ethical...some because they were told to by the media of the day. Many of the Northern soldiers were Irish immigrants..who were as racist as the day is long..but they were drafted..so they had no choice-they fought. Most soldiers don't fight for great causes..they fight for their buddy next to them..and to not seem a coward.

With a handful of exceptions...everyone of that time was racist by our standard....even the advocates for Emancipation

There were still slaves in the north. Not many, but some. They were grandfathered as part of the freeing of slaves in the north.

Indentured servitude was slavery. Just a type that you could buy your way out of. Many never did.

I have read that indentured servants were treated horribly.

Some were, some weren't. The same as the black slaves. These black liberation theology nutjobs want you to believe that white slavery was somehow different from black slavery.

It wasn't. The facts are some slave owners were scum, and others weren't. The color of the slave was immaterial.

 

[impuretrash]

Does this guy look "black" to you?

Kaaper - Wikipedia

How about this one?

The Seated Scribe - Wikipedia

What about this woman?

Nefertiti - Wikipedia

 

[IM2]

The white racist dumb ***** here are ignorant and have no factual knowledge of these issues.

Look, there is no similarity between indentured servitude and slavery. Let's just stop telling that lie. Indentured servitude was a contractual agreement . Irish historians say this.

Anatomy of a modern lie

• Nationalism is on the march, partly fuelled by partial or dishonest histories
• A particularly prevalent example is an invented ‘Irish slaves’ myth, which is very visible on social media
• One discredited book has been turned into racist propaganda by white nationalists on social media

By Liam Hogan

The debate over reparations for slavery is gathering pace in the United States, part of its great reckoning with its difficult problems with race. But one bad faith and ahistorical counterargument is once again coming to the fore on social media, usually appearing in the form: “the Irish were slaves, too: where are my reparations?”

This is the “Irish slaves” meme, a popular derailment tactic used increasingly by reactionaries since the Ferguson protests of 2014. This meme falsely equates the Irish American experience with racialised perpetual hereditary chattel slavery. It vandalises history to make the claim: “We were slaves, too, but we got over it, we’re not looking for handouts”.

It can be found in replies and in the comment sections beneath many of the news stories published on the Georgetown reparations, despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that it was two Irish Americans, Rev Thomas Mulledy and Rev William McSherry, who authorised and organised the original slave sales of the 1830s.

This is one of the great modern lies. It is popular and prevalent – and it is worth understanding how the perversion of the story of 17th-century transportation has gravitated to the centre of the racist culture wars of the early 21st century.

The place to start with grotesque dishonesty is the truth. And it is certainly the case that poor Irish people suffered horrific, gruesome treatment – including transportation to the British colonies. The application of this policy in Ireland was essentially a radical and colonial extension of the English Poor Law of 1601, which provided relief for those unable to work but also sought to impose social control by criminalising adult “idleness” and vagabondage.

In 1619 the spirit of this law was invoked to ship 100 destitute children from the streets of London to Virginia. In theory those that survived the journey were required to be apprentices for seven years. The mortality rate in Virginia was exceptionally high for colonists at this time due to disease and hard labour and it is unknown how many of these transported children survived into adulthood. In November 1619 the Virginia Company requested that another hundred children be sent from London but this time the minimum age was set at 12 years.

In 1620, the Virginia Company was granted authority by the Privy Council to coerce the “obstinate” into going. Similar orders for poor children to be sent to Virginia as “apprentices” were fulfilled throughout the 1620s and the illegal “spiriting” of children from the metropole continued into the 18th century.

The most significant forced movement of Irish people into the colonies, however, occurred under Oliver Cromwell’s “protectorate”. After his scouring of Ireland during the Civil War, which raged across the whole of the archipelago, the Lord Protector gave a personal assurance to the Irish people in 1650 that only those “ready to run to arms by the instigation of their Clergy or otherwise” would be at risk of being sent to the “Tobacco islands”.

But the focus and scope of transportation changed dramatically in 1653. It expanded to include the poor, their destination was the American colonies, their fate was indentured servitude, and coercion was now the policy’s defining characteristic. The first order to transport the destitute from Ireland to the colonies was issued in July when the “overseers of precincts” were

“Authorised to treat with merchants for transporting vagrants into some English plantation in America, where the said persons may find livelihood and maintenance by their labour, and to deliver over the said persons to the said merchants accordingly…”

From 1653 to 1657 vagrants were specifically ordered to be transported to the West Indies from Tipperary, Waterford, Wexford, Kilkenny, Carlow, Galway, Limerick, Cork and Dublin. The order to ship “disorderly persons” from Ireland to the American colonies was rescinded by the Council of State in March 1657 because of its abuse by merchants. This was of little comfort to those already shipped across the Atlantic and sold into years of oppressive servitude and unpaid labour.

But the core legal and customary distinctions between servitude (as reserved for Europeans) and slavery (as reserved for “Negroes”) were fundamentally different. Colonial servitude was temporary, usually voluntary, and, although the courts were often tilted against them, the servant’s legal personhood was recognised. Colonial slavery was permanent, always involuntary, racialised and heritable. The uterine law ensured that the children of slaves inherited the status of their mother. Their children were perpetual slaves. Their children’s children were perpetual slaves. Slavery was social death with no way out.

Slaves were placed outside of common law and so they had no rights – not even the right to life. While there are accounts of servants being freed from their contracts early, after proving that they had been ill-treated by their master, we find the opposite provision for the enslaved. A slave, suffering perpetual bondage, could instead be subjected to an array of grotesque physical punishments such as castration, being burned alive, the mashing of their limbs leading to dismemberment, broken bones, beheadings, the beating out of eyes, slitting of ears and various other mutilations.

The Irish slaves meme, in truth, started as something else. It has been long established in Irish nationalist and Catholic historiography and was invoked by prominent Irish patriots such as Daniel O’Connell in 1843 and James Connolly in 1915. These narratives generally used a broad definition of slavery and, given the rhetorical import, obviously never took the time to mention that this “slavery” was indentured servitude, and that the customs and laws pertaining to slavery in the colonies did not apply to them.

The first prominent Irish historian to add wind to the sails of this narrative was JP Prendergast. In his classic 1865 work The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland he (credibly) claimed that 6,400 Irish people had been forcibly transported to the West Indies during the 1650s. In this influential work he drew an explicit analogy with the transatlantic slave trade: “Ireland must have exhibited scenes in every part like the slave hunts in Africa,” while describing Irish people being forced onto “slave ships” by “English slave dealers”.

Historians estimate that several thousand Irish people suffered forced transportation to the American colonies during the 1650s. In contrast, the transatlantic slave trade lasted centuries, was the largest forced migration in world history, involving tens of millions of African people, and its poisonous legacy remains in the form of anti-black racism. It is, indeed, this very racism which has powered efforts to make the admittedly awful treatment meted out to Irish servants into something even worse than slavery.

But the modern manifestation of this phenomenon is something else. This is not from people steeped in Irish nationalism or overwritten 19th-century histories. At the root of the Irish slaves lie is, for the most part, a single article: “The Irish Slave Trade – The Forgotten ‘White’ Slaves – The Slaves That Time Forgot” which was put together by the unknown – and possibly non-existent author – John Martin.

Martin invented an “Irish slave trade” that operated from 1625 to 1839 and claimed that “the Irish experienced the horrors of slavery as much (if not more in the 17th century) as the Africans did”.

He told readers that “Irish slaves” were treated “worse” and were “cheaper” than enslaved Africans. He also included a racist anti-miscegenation fantasy that English planters had forced Irish women to breed with enslaved African men and that this “forced breeding” practice “was stopped only because it interfered with the profits of a large slave transport company”.

The extremism of this article’s propaganda cannot be overstated. It makes blatantly false claims: “If a planter whipped or branded or beat an Irish slave to death, it was never a crime.” One particularly callous lie is the implication that “Irish slaves” were the victims of the Zong Massacre – an actual massacre of 132 Africans who were killed in cold blood by the crew so that their value could be claimed back from the ship’s insurers.

“Irish slaves” were, Martin claims, “burned alive and had their heads placed on pikes in the marketplace as a warning to other captives.” He surmised that Ireland was “the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants”, that “the majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white”, and that the term “indentured servitude” was part of a liberal conspiracy to cover up the history of “white slavery”.

Disturbingly, it was not just partisan social media accounts that were responsible for the rise in popularity of this racist ahistorical propaganda. For a number of years some mainstream outlets and celebrities promoted it as a “forgotten” history. For instance Irish Central, a popular Irish-American news website, pushed it forward.

Far from being an “expert”, however, ‘John Martin’ had almost entirely plagiarised the “facts” of his article from an ahistorical blog published by an Irish-American blogger named “Jungle” Jim Cavanaugh in 2003, and much of his work was based on a single book, Sean O’Callaghan’s To Hell or Barbados: The ethnic cleansing of Ireland.

In this text, O’Callaghan deliberately conflates racial slavery and indentured servitude over 100 times. He embellished his “Irish slaves” narrative by directly co-opting well known descriptions of the torture of enslaved Africans. He also fabricated lurid and pornographic tales of the rape of Irish female servants by enslaved Africans and the abuse of children by paedophile English planters.

Anatomy of a modern lie

 

[westwall]

The white racist dumb ***** here are ignorant and have no factual knowledge of these issues.

Look, there is no similarity between indentured servitude and slavery. Let's just stop telling that lie. Indentured servitude was a contractual agreement . Irish historians say this.

Anatomy of a modern lie

• Nationalism is on the march, partly fuelled by partial or dishonest histories
• A particularly prevalent example is an invented ‘Irish slaves’ myth, which is very visible on social media
• One discredited book has been turned into racist propaganda by white nationalists on social media

By Liam Hogan

The debate over reparations for slavery is gathering pace in the United States, part of its great reckoning with its difficult problems with race. But one bad faith and ahistorical counterargument is once again coming to the fore on social media, usually appearing in the form: “the Irish were slaves, too: where are my reparations?”

This is the “Irish slaves” meme, a popular derailment tactic used increasingly by reactionaries since the Ferguson protests of 2014. This meme falsely equates the Irish American experience with racialised perpetual hereditary chattel slavery. It vandalises history to make the claim: “We were slaves, too, but we got over it, we’re not looking for handouts”.

It can be found in replies and in the comment sections beneath many of the news stories published on the Georgetown reparations, despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that it was two Irish Americans, Rev Thomas Mulledy and Rev William McSherry, who authorised and organised the original slave sales of the 1830s.

This is one of the great modern lies. It is popular and prevalent – and it is worth understanding how the perversion of the story of 17th-century transportation has gravitated to the centre of the racist culture wars of the early 21st century.

The place to start with grotesque dishonesty is the truth. And it is certainly the case that poor Irish people suffered horrific, gruesome treatment – including transportation to the British colonies. The application of this policy in Ireland was essentially a radical and colonial extension of the English Poor Law of 1601, which provided relief for those unable to work but also sought to impose social control by criminalising adult “idleness” and vagabondage.

In 1619 the spirit of this law was invoked to ship 100 destitute children from the streets of London to Virginia. In theory those that survived the journey were required to be apprentices for seven years. The mortality rate in Virginia was exceptionally high for colonists at this time due to disease and hard labour and it is unknown how many of these transported children survived into adulthood. In November 1619 the Virginia Company requested that another hundred children be sent from London but this time the minimum age was set at 12 years.

In 1620, the Virginia Company was granted authority by the Privy Council to coerce the “obstinate” into going. Similar orders for poor children to be sent to Virginia as “apprentices” were fulfilled throughout the 1620s and the illegal “spiriting” of children from the metropole continued into the 18th century.

The most significant forced movement of Irish people into the colonies, however, occurred under Oliver Cromwell’s “protectorate”. After his scouring of Ireland during the Civil War, which raged across the whole of the archipelago, the Lord Protector gave a personal assurance to the Irish people in 1650 that only those “ready to run to arms by the instigation of their Clergy or otherwise” would be at risk of being sent to the “Tobacco islands”.

But the focus and scope of transportation changed dramatically in 1653. It expanded to include the poor, their destination was the American colonies, their fate was indentured servitude, and coercion was now the policy’s defining characteristic. The first order to transport the destitute from Ireland to the colonies was issued in July when the “overseers of precincts” were

“Authorised to treat with merchants for transporting vagrants into some English plantation in America, where the said persons may find livelihood and maintenance by their labour, and to deliver over the said persons to the said merchants accordingly…”

From 1653 to 1657 vagrants were specifically ordered to be transported to the West Indies from Tipperary, Waterford, Wexford, Kilkenny, Carlow, Galway, Limerick, Cork and Dublin. The order to ship “disorderly persons” from Ireland to the American colonies was rescinded by the Council of State in March 1657 because of its abuse by merchants. This was of little comfort to those already shipped across the Atlantic and sold into years of oppressive servitude and unpaid labour.

But the core legal and customary distinctions between servitude (as reserved for Europeans) and slavery (as reserved for “Negroes”) were fundamentally different. Colonial servitude was temporary, usually voluntary, and, although the courts were often tilted against them, the servant’s legal personhood was recognised. Colonial slavery was permanent, always involuntary, racialised and heritable. The uterine law ensured that the children of slaves inherited the status of their mother. Their children were perpetual slaves. Their children’s children were perpetual slaves. Slavery was social death with no way out.

Slaves were placed outside of common law and so they had no rights – not even the right to life. While there are accounts of servants being freed from their contracts early, after proving that they had been ill-treated by their master, we find the opposite provision for the enslaved. A slave, suffering perpetual bondage, could instead be subjected to an array of grotesque physical punishments such as castration, being burned alive, the mashing of their limbs leading to dismemberment, broken bones, beheadings, the beating out of eyes, slitting of ears and various other mutilations.

The Irish slaves meme, in truth, started as something else. It has been long established in Irish nationalist and Catholic historiography and was invoked by prominent Irish patriots such as Daniel O’Connell in 1843 and James Connolly in 1915. These narratives generally used a broad definition of slavery and, given the rhetorical import, obviously never took the time to mention that this “slavery” was indentured servitude, and that the customs and laws pertaining to slavery in the colonies did not apply to them.

The first prominent Irish historian to add wind to the sails of this narrative was JP Prendergast. In his classic 1865 work The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland he (credibly) claimed that 6,400 Irish people had been forcibly transported to the West Indies during the 1650s. In this influential work he drew an explicit analogy with the transatlantic slave trade: “Ireland must have exhibited scenes in every part like the slave hunts in Africa,” while describing Irish people being forced onto “slave ships” by “English slave dealers”.

Historians estimate that several thousand Irish people suffered forced transportation to the American colonies during the 1650s. In contrast, the transatlantic slave trade lasted centuries, was the largest forced migration in world history, involving tens of millions of African people, and its poisonous legacy remains in the form of anti-black racism. It is, indeed, this very racism which has powered efforts to make the admittedly awful treatment meted out to Irish servants into something even worse than slavery.

But the modern manifestation of this phenomenon is something else. This is not from people steeped in Irish nationalism or overwritten 19th-century histories. At the root of the Irish slaves lie is, for the most part, a single article: “The Irish Slave Trade – The Forgotten ‘White’ Slaves – The Slaves That Time Forgot” which was put together by the unknown – and possibly non-existent author – John Martin.

Martin invented an “Irish slave trade” that operated from 1625 to 1839 and claimed that “the Irish experienced the horrors of slavery as much (if not more in the 17th century) as the Africans did”.

He told readers that “Irish slaves” were treated “worse” and were “cheaper” than enslaved Africans. He also included a racist anti-miscegenation fantasy that English planters had forced Irish women to breed with enslaved African men and that this “forced breeding” practice “was stopped only because it interfered with the profits of a large slave transport company”.

The extremism of this article’s propaganda cannot be overstated. It makes blatantly false claims: “If a planter whipped or branded or beat an Irish slave to death, it was never a crime.” One particularly callous lie is the implication that “Irish slaves” were the victims of the Zong Massacre – an actual massacre of 132 Africans who were killed in cold blood by the crew so that their value could be claimed back from the ship’s insurers.

“Irish slaves” were, Martin claims, “burned alive and had their heads placed on pikes in the marketplace as a warning to other captives.” He surmised that Ireland was “the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants”, that “the majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white”, and that the term “indentured servitude” was part of a liberal conspiracy to cover up the history of “white slavery”.

Disturbingly, it was not just partisan social media accounts that were responsible for the rise in popularity of this racist ahistorical propaganda. For a number of years some mainstream outlets and celebrities promoted it as a “forgotten” history. For instance Irish Central, a popular Irish-American news website, pushed it forward.

Far from being an “expert”, however, ‘John Martin’ had almost entirely plagiarised the “facts” of his article from an ahistorical blog published by an Irish-American blogger named “Jungle” Jim Cavanaugh in 2003, and much of his work was based on a single book, Sean O’Callaghan’s To Hell or Barbados: The ethnic cleansing of Ireland.

In this text, O’Callaghan deliberately conflates racial slavery and indentured servitude over 100 times. He embellished his “Irish slaves” narrative by directly co-opting well known descriptions of the torture of enslaved Africans. He also fabricated lurid and pornographic tales of the rape of Irish female servants by enslaved Africans and the abuse of children by paedophile English planters.

Anatomy of a modern lie

I feel sorry for you guy. That level of hatred is going to eat you alive. I really hope you seek some help.

 

[Godboy]

The white racist dumb ***** here are ignorant and have no factual knowledge of these issues.

Look, there is no similarity between indentured servitude and slavery. Let's just stop telling that lie. Indentured servitude was a contractual agreement . Irish historians say this.

Anatomy of a modern lie

• Nationalism is on the march, partly fuelled by partial or dishonest histories
• A particularly prevalent example is an invented ‘Irish slaves’ myth, which is very visible on social media
• One discredited book has been turned into racist propaganda by white nationalists on social media

By Liam Hogan

The debate over reparations for slavery is gathering pace in the United States, part of its great reckoning with its difficult problems with race. But one bad faith and ahistorical counterargument is once again coming to the fore on social media, usually appearing in the form: “the Irish were slaves, too: where are my reparations?”

This is the “Irish slaves” meme, a popular derailment tactic used increasingly by reactionaries since the Ferguson protests of 2014. This meme falsely equates the Irish American experience with racialised perpetual hereditary chattel slavery. It vandalises history to make the claim: “We were slaves, too, but we got over it, we’re not looking for handouts”.

It can be found in replies and in the comment sections beneath many of the news stories published on the Georgetown reparations, despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that it was two Irish Americans, Rev Thomas Mulledy and Rev William McSherry, who authorised and organised the original slave sales of the 1830s.

This is one of the great modern lies. It is popular and prevalent – and it is worth understanding how the perversion of the story of 17th-century transportation has gravitated to the centre of the racist culture wars of the early 21st century.

The place to start with grotesque dishonesty is the truth. And it is certainly the case that poor Irish people suffered horrific, gruesome treatment – including transportation to the British colonies. The application of this policy in Ireland was essentially a radical and colonial extension of the English Poor Law of 1601, which provided relief for those unable to work but also sought to impose social control by criminalising adult “idleness” and vagabondage.

In 1619 the spirit of this law was invoked to ship 100 destitute children from the streets of London to Virginia. In theory those that survived the journey were required to be apprentices for seven years. The mortality rate in Virginia was exceptionally high for colonists at this time due to disease and hard labour and it is unknown how many of these transported children survived into adulthood. In November 1619 the Virginia Company requested that another hundred children be sent from London but this time the minimum age was set at 12 years.

In 1620, the Virginia Company was granted authority by the Privy Council to coerce the “obstinate” into going. Similar orders for poor children to be sent to Virginia as “apprentices” were fulfilled throughout the 1620s and the illegal “spiriting” of children from the metropole continued into the 18th century.

The most significant forced movement of Irish people into the colonies, however, occurred under Oliver Cromwell’s “protectorate”. After his scouring of Ireland during the Civil War, which raged across the whole of the archipelago, the Lord Protector gave a personal assurance to the Irish people in 1650 that only those “ready to run to arms by the instigation of their Clergy or otherwise” would be at risk of being sent to the “Tobacco islands”.

But the focus and scope of transportation changed dramatically in 1653. It expanded to include the poor, their destination was the American colonies, their fate was indentured servitude, and coercion was now the policy’s defining characteristic. The first order to transport the destitute from Ireland to the colonies was issued in July when the “overseers of precincts” were

“Authorised to treat with merchants for transporting vagrants into some English plantation in America, where the said persons may find livelihood and maintenance by their labour, and to deliver over the said persons to the said merchants accordingly…”

From 1653 to 1657 vagrants were specifically ordered to be transported to the West Indies from Tipperary, Waterford, Wexford, Kilkenny, Carlow, Galway, Limerick, Cork and Dublin. The order to ship “disorderly persons” from Ireland to the American colonies was rescinded by the Council of State in March 1657 because of its abuse by merchants. This was of little comfort to those already shipped across the Atlantic and sold into years of oppressive servitude and unpaid labour.

But the core legal and customary distinctions between servitude (as reserved for Europeans) and slavery (as reserved for “Negroes”) were fundamentally different. Colonial servitude was temporary, usually voluntary, and, although the courts were often tilted against them, the servant’s legal personhood was recognised. Colonial slavery was permanent, always involuntary, racialised and heritable. The uterine law ensured that the children of slaves inherited the status of their mother. Their children were perpetual slaves. Their children’s children were perpetual slaves. Slavery was social death with no way out.

Slaves were placed outside of common law and so they had no rights – not even the right to life. While there are accounts of servants being freed from their contracts early, after proving that they had been ill-treated by their master, we find the opposite provision for the enslaved. A slave, suffering perpetual bondage, could instead be subjected to an array of grotesque physical punishments such as castration, being burned alive, the mashing of their limbs leading to dismemberment, broken bones, beheadings, the beating out of eyes, slitting of ears and various other mutilations.

The Irish slaves meme, in truth, started as something else. It has been long established in Irish nationalist and Catholic historiography and was invoked by prominent Irish patriots such as Daniel O’Connell in 1843 and James Connolly in 1915. These narratives generally used a broad definition of slavery and, given the rhetorical import, obviously never took the time to mention that this “slavery” was indentured servitude, and that the customs and laws pertaining to slavery in the colonies did not apply to them.

The first prominent Irish historian to add wind to the sails of this narrative was JP Prendergast. In his classic 1865 work The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland he (credibly) claimed that 6,400 Irish people had been forcibly transported to the West Indies during the 1650s. In this influential work he drew an explicit analogy with the transatlantic slave trade: “Ireland must have exhibited scenes in every part like the slave hunts in Africa,” while describing Irish people being forced onto “slave ships” by “English slave dealers”.

Historians estimate that several thousand Irish people suffered forced transportation to the American colonies during the 1650s. In contrast, the transatlantic slave trade lasted centuries, was the largest forced migration in world history, involving tens of millions of African people, and its poisonous legacy remains in the form of anti-black racism. It is, indeed, this very racism which has powered efforts to make the admittedly awful treatment meted out to Irish servants into something even worse than slavery.

But the modern manifestation of this phenomenon is something else. This is not from people steeped in Irish nationalism or overwritten 19th-century histories. At the root of the Irish slaves lie is, for the most part, a single article: “The Irish Slave Trade – The Forgotten ‘White’ Slaves – The Slaves That Time Forgot” which was put together by the unknown – and possibly non-existent author – John Martin.

Martin invented an “Irish slave trade” that operated from 1625 to 1839 and claimed that “the Irish experienced the horrors of slavery as much (if not more in the 17th century) as the Africans did”.

He told readers that “Irish slaves” were treated “worse” and were “cheaper” than enslaved Africans. He also included a racist anti-miscegenation fantasy that English planters had forced Irish women to breed with enslaved African men and that this “forced breeding” practice “was stopped only because it interfered with the profits of a large slave transport company”.

The extremism of this article’s propaganda cannot be overstated. It makes blatantly false claims: “If a planter whipped or branded or beat an Irish slave to death, it was never a crime.” One particularly callous lie is the implication that “Irish slaves” were the victims of the Zong Massacre – an actual massacre of 132 Africans who were killed in cold blood by the crew so that their value could be claimed back from the ship’s insurers.

“Irish slaves” were, Martin claims, “burned alive and had their heads placed on pikes in the marketplace as a warning to other captives.” He surmised that Ireland was “the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants”, that “the majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white”, and that the term “indentured servitude” was part of a liberal conspiracy to cover up the history of “white slavery”.

Disturbingly, it was not just partisan social media accounts that were responsible for the rise in popularity of this racist ahistorical propaganda. For a number of years some mainstream outlets and celebrities promoted it as a “forgotten” history. For instance Irish Central, a popular Irish-American news website, pushed it forward.

Far from being an “expert”, however, ‘John Martin’ had almost entirely plagiarised the “facts” of his article from an ahistorical blog published by an Irish-American blogger named “Jungle” Jim Cavanaugh in 2003, and much of his work was based on a single book, Sean O’Callaghan’s To Hell or Barbados: The ethnic cleansing of Ireland.

In this text, O’Callaghan deliberately conflates racial slavery and indentured servitude over 100 times. He embellished his “Irish slaves” narrative by directly co-opting well known descriptions of the torture of enslaved Africans. He also fabricated lurid and pornographic tales of the rape of Irish female servants by enslaved Africans and the abuse of children by paedophile English planters.

Anatomy of a modern lie

All races and groups have been enslaved. What makes you so special? Quit whining about shit that never happened to you. You don't get to hijack the plights of historical people.

 

[IM2]

**** it. It's time to shut mouths.

No, the Irish were not slaves in the Americas
March 16, 2018
By Eoin O'Carroll

Despite efforts to debunk the falsehood, the notion of 'Irish slaves' continues to circulate online, clouding discussions about racism and further complicating relations between Irish-Americans and African-Americans.

n America, St. Patrick's Day, which arrives on Saturday, means peak exposure to a particular class of assertion that Irish people charitably refer to as "blarney."

You might hear, for instance, that St. Patrick chased the snakes out of Ireland (they were never there in the first place), that the color historically associated with him is green (it's actually blue), that he evangelized with a four-leaf clover (three leaves, to represent the Trinity), or that an Irish monk “discovered” America 500 years before Columbus (utter bollocks).

These misconceptions are relatively harmless, as misconceptions go, but there's another one, strangling some online comment threads about racism like an invasive vine, that some historians have been working tirelessly to stamp out. It’s the claim that Irish people were slaves in the Americas, particularly the British West Indies, and that they were treated just as badly as – or worse than – their African counterparts.

“I conservatively estimate that tens of millions of people have been exposed to ‘Irish slaves’ disinformation in one form or another on social media,” says Liam Hogan, a research librarian in Limerick, Ireland, who has led efforts to debunk this myth. “These people, some of whom are Irish-American, are essentially digging up our ancestors’ bones and sharpening them into rhetorical weapons to use against people of color.”

Fueled by an influential 2001 book by Irish journalist Sean O’Callaghan titled “To Hell or Barbados,” the myth began propagating online in far-right circles in the past decade, eventually making its way into mainstream publications such as Scientific American, which corrected their article, and Daily Kos, which didn’t.

Today, you’ll find the claim popping up in comment threads on issues ranging from reparations to police brutality, where it is nearly always deployed as a way to criticize African-Americans and other nonwhites for being too vocal in their demands for social justice. “We were slaves too,” the typical comment goes, “and you don’t hear us complaining.”

No, the Irish were not slaves in the Americas

 

[westwall]

**** it. It's time to shut mouths.

No, the Irish were not slaves in the Americas
March 16, 2018
By Eoin O'Carroll

Despite efforts to debunk the falsehood, the notion of 'Irish slaves' continues to circulate online, clouding discussions about racism and further complicating relations between Irish-Americans and African-Americans.

n America, St. Patrick's Day, which arrives on Saturday, means peak exposure to a particular class of assertion that Irish people charitably refer to as "blarney."

You might hear, for instance, that St. Patrick chased the snakes out of Ireland (they were never there in the first place), that the color historically associated with him is green (it's actually blue), that he evangelized with a four-leaf clover (three leaves, to represent the Trinity), or that an Irish monk “discovered” America 500 years before Columbus (utter bollocks).

These misconceptions are relatively harmless, as misconceptions go, but there's another one, strangling some online comment threads about racism like an invasive vine, that some historians have been working tirelessly to stamp out. It’s the claim that Irish people were slaves in the Americas, particularly the British West Indies, and that they were treated just as badly as – or worse than – their African counterparts.

“I conservatively estimate that tens of millions of people have been exposed to ‘Irish slaves’ disinformation in one form or another on social media,” says Liam Hogan, a research librarian in Limerick, Ireland, who has led efforts to debunk this myth. “These people, some of whom are Irish-American, are essentially digging up our ancestors’ bones and sharpening them into rhetorical weapons to use against people of color.”

Fueled by an influential 2001 book by Irish journalist Sean O’Callaghan titled “To Hell or Barbados,” the myth began propagating online in far-right circles in the past decade, eventually making its way into mainstream publications such as Scientific American, which corrected their article, and Daily Kos, which didn’t.

Today, you’ll find the claim popping up in comment threads on issues ranging from reparations to police brutality, where it is nearly always deployed as a way to criticize African-Americans and other nonwhites for being too vocal in their demands for social justice. “We were slaves too,” the typical comment goes, “and you don’t hear us complaining.”

No, the Irish were not slaves in the Americas

Start with your mouth, dude.

 

[IM2]

The white racist dumb ***** here are ignorant and have no factual knowledge of these issues.

Look, there is no similarity between indentured servitude and slavery. Let's just stop telling that lie. Indentured servitude was a contractual agreement . Irish historians say this.

Anatomy of a modern lie

• Nationalism is on the march, partly fuelled by partial or dishonest histories
• A particularly prevalent example is an invented ‘Irish slaves’ myth, which is very visible on social media
• One discredited book has been turned into racist propaganda by white nationalists on social media

By Liam Hogan

The debate over reparations for slavery is gathering pace in the United States, part of its great reckoning with its difficult problems with race. But one bad faith and ahistorical counterargument is once again coming to the fore on social media, usually appearing in the form: “the Irish were slaves, too: where are my reparations?”

This is the “Irish slaves” meme, a popular derailment tactic used increasingly by reactionaries since the Ferguson protests of 2014. This meme falsely equates the Irish American experience with racialised perpetual hereditary chattel slavery. It vandalises history to make the claim: “We were slaves, too, but we got over it, we’re not looking for handouts”.

It can be found in replies and in the comment sections beneath many of the news stories published on the Georgetown reparations, despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that it was two Irish Americans, Rev Thomas Mulledy and Rev William McSherry, who authorised and organised the original slave sales of the 1830s.

This is one of the great modern lies. It is popular and prevalent – and it is worth understanding how the perversion of the story of 17th-century transportation has gravitated to the centre of the racist culture wars of the early 21st century.

The place to start with grotesque dishonesty is the truth. And it is certainly the case that poor Irish people suffered horrific, gruesome treatment – including transportation to the British colonies. The application of this policy in Ireland was essentially a radical and colonial extension of the English Poor Law of 1601, which provided relief for those unable to work but also sought to impose social control by criminalising adult “idleness” and vagabondage.

In 1619 the spirit of this law was invoked to ship 100 destitute children from the streets of London to Virginia. In theory those that survived the journey were required to be apprentices for seven years. The mortality rate in Virginia was exceptionally high for colonists at this time due to disease and hard labour and it is unknown how many of these transported children survived into adulthood. In November 1619 the Virginia Company requested that another hundred children be sent from London but this time the minimum age was set at 12 years.

In 1620, the Virginia Company was granted authority by the Privy Council to coerce the “obstinate” into going. Similar orders for poor children to be sent to Virginia as “apprentices” were fulfilled throughout the 1620s and the illegal “spiriting” of children from the metropole continued into the 18th century.

The most significant forced movement of Irish people into the colonies, however, occurred under Oliver Cromwell’s “protectorate”. After his scouring of Ireland during the Civil War, which raged across the whole of the archipelago, the Lord Protector gave a personal assurance to the Irish people in 1650 that only those “ready to run to arms by the instigation of their Clergy or otherwise” would be at risk of being sent to the “Tobacco islands”.

But the focus and scope of transportation changed dramatically in 1653. It expanded to include the poor, their destination was the American colonies, their fate was indentured servitude, and coercion was now the policy’s defining characteristic. The first order to transport the destitute from Ireland to the colonies was issued in July when the “overseers of precincts” were

“Authorised to treat with merchants for transporting vagrants into some English plantation in America, where the said persons may find livelihood and maintenance by their labour, and to deliver over the said persons to the said merchants accordingly…”

From 1653 to 1657 vagrants were specifically ordered to be transported to the West Indies from Tipperary, Waterford, Wexford, Kilkenny, Carlow, Galway, Limerick, Cork and Dublin. The order to ship “disorderly persons” from Ireland to the American colonies was rescinded by the Council of State in March 1657 because of its abuse by merchants. This was of little comfort to those already shipped across the Atlantic and sold into years of oppressive servitude and unpaid labour.

But the core legal and customary distinctions between servitude (as reserved for Europeans) and slavery (as reserved for “Negroes”) were fundamentally different. Colonial servitude was temporary, usually voluntary, and, although the courts were often tilted against them, the servant’s legal personhood was recognised. Colonial slavery was permanent, always involuntary, racialised and heritable. The uterine law ensured that the children of slaves inherited the status of their mother. Their children were perpetual slaves. Their children’s children were perpetual slaves. Slavery was social death with no way out.

Slaves were placed outside of common law and so they had no rights – not even the right to life. While there are accounts of servants being freed from their contracts early, after proving that they had been ill-treated by their master, we find the opposite provision for the enslaved. A slave, suffering perpetual bondage, could instead be subjected to an array of grotesque physical punishments such as castration, being burned alive, the mashing of their limbs leading to dismemberment, broken bones, beheadings, the beating out of eyes, slitting of ears and various other mutilations.

The Irish slaves meme, in truth, started as something else. It has been long established in Irish nationalist and Catholic historiography and was invoked by prominent Irish patriots such as Daniel O’Connell in 1843 and James Connolly in 1915. These narratives generally used a broad definition of slavery and, given the rhetorical import, obviously never took the time to mention that this “slavery” was indentured servitude, and that the customs and laws pertaining to slavery in the colonies did not apply to them.

The first prominent Irish historian to add wind to the sails of this narrative was JP Prendergast. In his classic 1865 work The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland he (credibly) claimed that 6,400 Irish people had been forcibly transported to the West Indies during the 1650s. In this influential work he drew an explicit analogy with the transatlantic slave trade: “Ireland must have exhibited scenes in every part like the slave hunts in Africa,” while describing Irish people being forced onto “slave ships” by “English slave dealers”.

Historians estimate that several thousand Irish people suffered forced transportation to the American colonies during the 1650s. In contrast, the transatlantic slave trade lasted centuries, was the largest forced migration in world history, involving tens of millions of African people, and its poisonous legacy remains in the form of anti-black racism. It is, indeed, this very racism which has powered efforts to make the admittedly awful treatment meted out to Irish servants into something even worse than slavery.

But the modern manifestation of this phenomenon is something else. This is not from people steeped in Irish nationalism or overwritten 19th-century histories. At the root of the Irish slaves lie is, for the most part, a single article: “The Irish Slave Trade – The Forgotten ‘White’ Slaves – The Slaves That Time Forgot” which was put together by the unknown – and possibly non-existent author – John Martin.

Martin invented an “Irish slave trade” that operated from 1625 to 1839 and claimed that “the Irish experienced the horrors of slavery as much (if not more in the 17th century) as the Africans did”.

He told readers that “Irish slaves” were treated “worse” and were “cheaper” than enslaved Africans. He also included a racist anti-miscegenation fantasy that English planters had forced Irish women to breed with enslaved African men and that this “forced breeding” practice “was stopped only because it interfered with the profits of a large slave transport company”.

The extremism of this article’s propaganda cannot be overstated. It makes blatantly false claims: “If a planter whipped or branded or beat an Irish slave to death, it was never a crime.” One particularly callous lie is the implication that “Irish slaves” were the victims of the Zong Massacre – an actual massacre of 132 Africans who were killed in cold blood by the crew so that their value could be claimed back from the ship’s insurers.

“Irish slaves” were, Martin claims, “burned alive and had their heads placed on pikes in the marketplace as a warning to other captives.” He surmised that Ireland was “the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants”, that “the majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white”, and that the term “indentured servitude” was part of a liberal conspiracy to cover up the history of “white slavery”.

Disturbingly, it was not just partisan social media accounts that were responsible for the rise in popularity of this racist ahistorical propaganda. For a number of years some mainstream outlets and celebrities promoted it as a “forgotten” history. For instance Irish Central, a popular Irish-American news website, pushed it forward.

Far from being an “expert”, however, ‘John Martin’ had almost entirely plagiarised the “facts” of his article from an ahistorical blog published by an Irish-American blogger named “Jungle” Jim Cavanaugh in 2003, and much of his work was based on a single book, Sean O’Callaghan’s To Hell or Barbados: The ethnic cleansing of Ireland.

In this text, O’Callaghan deliberately conflates racial slavery and indentured servitude over 100 times. He embellished his “Irish slaves” narrative by directly co-opting well known descriptions of the torture of enslaved Africans. He also fabricated lurid and pornographic tales of the rape of Irish female servants by enslaved Africans and the abuse of children by paedophile English planters.

Anatomy of a modern lie

All races and groups have been enslaved. What makes you so special? Quit whining about shit that never happened to you. You don't get to hijack the plights of historical people.

STFU. Jim Crow happened to me ***** and that was the white backlash for having to free us from slavery.

 

[Godboy]

The white racist dumb ***** here are ignorant and have no factual knowledge of these issues.

Look, there is no similarity between indentured servitude and slavery. Let's just stop telling that lie. Indentured servitude was a contractual agreement . Irish historians say this.

Anatomy of a modern lie

• Nationalism is on the march, partly fuelled by partial or dishonest histories
• A particularly prevalent example is an invented ‘Irish slaves’ myth, which is very visible on social media
• One discredited book has been turned into racist propaganda by white nationalists on social media

By Liam Hogan

The debate over reparations for slavery is gathering pace in the United States, part of its great reckoning with its difficult problems with race. But one bad faith and ahistorical counterargument is once again coming to the fore on social media, usually appearing in the form: “the Irish were slaves, too: where are my reparations?”

This is the “Irish slaves” meme, a popular derailment tactic used increasingly by reactionaries since the Ferguson protests of 2014. This meme falsely equates the Irish American experience with racialised perpetual hereditary chattel slavery. It vandalises history to make the claim: “We were slaves, too, but we got over it, we’re not looking for handouts”.

It can be found in replies and in the comment sections beneath many of the news stories published on the Georgetown reparations, despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that it was two Irish Americans, Rev Thomas Mulledy and Rev William McSherry, who authorised and organised the original slave sales of the 1830s.

This is one of the great modern lies. It is popular and prevalent – and it is worth understanding how the perversion of the story of 17th-century transportation has gravitated to the centre of the racist culture wars of the early 21st century.

The place to start with grotesque dishonesty is the truth. And it is certainly the case that poor Irish people suffered horrific, gruesome treatment – including transportation to the British colonies. The application of this policy in Ireland was essentially a radical and colonial extension of the English Poor Law of 1601, which provided relief for those unable to work but also sought to impose social control by criminalising adult “idleness” and vagabondage.

In 1619 the spirit of this law was invoked to ship 100 destitute children from the streets of London to Virginia. In theory those that survived the journey were required to be apprentices for seven years. The mortality rate in Virginia was exceptionally high for colonists at this time due to disease and hard labour and it is unknown how many of these transported children survived into adulthood. In November 1619 the Virginia Company requested that another hundred children be sent from London but this time the minimum age was set at 12 years.

In 1620, the Virginia Company was granted authority by the Privy Council to coerce the “obstinate” into going. Similar orders for poor children to be sent to Virginia as “apprentices” were fulfilled throughout the 1620s and the illegal “spiriting” of children from the metropole continued into the 18th century.

The most significant forced movement of Irish people into the colonies, however, occurred under Oliver Cromwell’s “protectorate”. After his scouring of Ireland during the Civil War, which raged across the whole of the archipelago, the Lord Protector gave a personal assurance to the Irish people in 1650 that only those “ready to run to arms by the instigation of their Clergy or otherwise” would be at risk of being sent to the “Tobacco islands”.

But the focus and scope of transportation changed dramatically in 1653. It expanded to include the poor, their destination was the American colonies, their fate was indentured servitude, and coercion was now the policy’s defining characteristic. The first order to transport the destitute from Ireland to the colonies was issued in July when the “overseers of precincts” were

“Authorised to treat with merchants for transporting vagrants into some English plantation in America, where the said persons may find livelihood and maintenance by their labour, and to deliver over the said persons to the said merchants accordingly…”

From 1653 to 1657 vagrants were specifically ordered to be transported to the West Indies from Tipperary, Waterford, Wexford, Kilkenny, Carlow, Galway, Limerick, Cork and Dublin. The order to ship “disorderly persons” from Ireland to the American colonies was rescinded by the Council of State in March 1657 because of its abuse by merchants. This was of little comfort to those already shipped across the Atlantic and sold into years of oppressive servitude and unpaid labour.

But the core legal and customary distinctions between servitude (as reserved for Europeans) and slavery (as reserved for “Negroes”) were fundamentally different. Colonial servitude was temporary, usually voluntary, and, although the courts were often tilted against them, the servant’s legal personhood was recognised. Colonial slavery was permanent, always involuntary, racialised and heritable. The uterine law ensured that the children of slaves inherited the status of their mother. Their children were perpetual slaves. Their children’s children were perpetual slaves. Slavery was social death with no way out.

Slaves were placed outside of common law and so they had no rights – not even the right to life. While there are accounts of servants being freed from their contracts early, after proving that they had been ill-treated by their master, we find the opposite provision for the enslaved. A slave, suffering perpetual bondage, could instead be subjected to an array of grotesque physical punishments such as castration, being burned alive, the mashing of their limbs leading to dismemberment, broken bones, beheadings, the beating out of eyes, slitting of ears and various other mutilations.

The Irish slaves meme, in truth, started as something else. It has been long established in Irish nationalist and Catholic historiography and was invoked by prominent Irish patriots such as Daniel O’Connell in 1843 and James Connolly in 1915. These narratives generally used a broad definition of slavery and, given the rhetorical import, obviously never took the time to mention that this “slavery” was indentured servitude, and that the customs and laws pertaining to slavery in the colonies did not apply to them.

The first prominent Irish historian to add wind to the sails of this narrative was JP Prendergast. In his classic 1865 work The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland he (credibly) claimed that 6,400 Irish people had been forcibly transported to the West Indies during the 1650s. In this influential work he drew an explicit analogy with the transatlantic slave trade: “Ireland must have exhibited scenes in every part like the slave hunts in Africa,” while describing Irish people being forced onto “slave ships” by “English slave dealers”.

Historians estimate that several thousand Irish people suffered forced transportation to the American colonies during the 1650s. In contrast, the transatlantic slave trade lasted centuries, was the largest forced migration in world history, involving tens of millions of African people, and its poisonous legacy remains in the form of anti-black racism. It is, indeed, this very racism which has powered efforts to make the admittedly awful treatment meted out to Irish servants into something even worse than slavery.

But the modern manifestation of this phenomenon is something else. This is not from people steeped in Irish nationalism or overwritten 19th-century histories. At the root of the Irish slaves lie is, for the most part, a single article: “The Irish Slave Trade – The Forgotten ‘White’ Slaves – The Slaves That Time Forgot” which was put together by the unknown – and possibly non-existent author – John Martin.

Martin invented an “Irish slave trade” that operated from 1625 to 1839 and claimed that “the Irish experienced the horrors of slavery as much (if not more in the 17th century) as the Africans did”.

He told readers that “Irish slaves” were treated “worse” and were “cheaper” than enslaved Africans. He also included a racist anti-miscegenation fantasy that English planters had forced Irish women to breed with enslaved African men and that this “forced breeding” practice “was stopped only because it interfered with the profits of a large slave transport company”.

The extremism of this article’s propaganda cannot be overstated. It makes blatantly false claims: “If a planter whipped or branded or beat an Irish slave to death, it was never a crime.” One particularly callous lie is the implication that “Irish slaves” were the victims of the Zong Massacre – an actual massacre of 132 Africans who were killed in cold blood by the crew so that their value could be claimed back from the ship’s insurers.

“Irish slaves” were, Martin claims, “burned alive and had their heads placed on pikes in the marketplace as a warning to other captives.” He surmised that Ireland was “the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants”, that “the majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white”, and that the term “indentured servitude” was part of a liberal conspiracy to cover up the history of “white slavery”.

Disturbingly, it was not just partisan social media accounts that were responsible for the rise in popularity of this racist ahistorical propaganda. For a number of years some mainstream outlets and celebrities promoted it as a “forgotten” history. For instance Irish Central, a popular Irish-American news website, pushed it forward.

Far from being an “expert”, however, ‘John Martin’ had almost entirely plagiarised the “facts” of his article from an ahistorical blog published by an Irish-American blogger named “Jungle” Jim Cavanaugh in 2003, and much of his work was based on a single book, Sean O’Callaghan’s To Hell or Barbados: The ethnic cleansing of Ireland.

In this text, O’Callaghan deliberately conflates racial slavery and indentured servitude over 100 times. He embellished his “Irish slaves” narrative by directly co-opting well known descriptions of the torture of enslaved Africans. He also fabricated lurid and pornographic tales of the rape of Irish female servants by enslaved Africans and the abuse of children by paedophile English planters.

Anatomy of a modern lie

All races and groups have been enslaved. What makes you so special? Quit whining about shit that never happened to you. You don't get to hijack the plights of historical people.

STFU. Jim Crow happened to me ***** and that was the white backlash for having to free us from slavery.

Nothing happened to you. Here you are, shouting your foul opinions to the world. Not a single white man is stopping you. Ain't freedom great?

 

[Butch_Coolidge]

The white racist dumb ***** here are ignorant and have no factual knowledge of these issues.

Look, there is no similarity between indentured servitude and slavery. Let's just stop telling that lie. Indentured servitude was a contractual agreement . Irish historians say this.

Anatomy of a modern lie

• Nationalism is on the march, partly fuelled by partial or dishonest histories
• A particularly prevalent example is an invented ‘Irish slaves’ myth, which is very visible on social media
• One discredited book has been turned into racist propaganda by white nationalists on social media

By Liam Hogan

The debate over reparations for slavery is gathering pace in the United States, part of its great reckoning with its difficult problems with race. But one bad faith and ahistorical counterargument is once again coming to the fore on social media, usually appearing in the form: “the Irish were slaves, too: where are my reparations?”

This is the “Irish slaves” meme, a popular derailment tactic used increasingly by reactionaries since the Ferguson protests of 2014. This meme falsely equates the Irish American experience with racialised perpetual hereditary chattel slavery. It vandalises history to make the claim: “We were slaves, too, but we got over it, we’re not looking for handouts”.

It can be found in replies and in the comment sections beneath many of the news stories published on the Georgetown reparations, despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that it was two Irish Americans, Rev Thomas Mulledy and Rev William McSherry, who authorised and organised the original slave sales of the 1830s.

This is one of the great modern lies. It is popular and prevalent – and it is worth understanding how the perversion of the story of 17th-century transportation has gravitated to the centre of the racist culture wars of the early 21st century.

The place to start with grotesque dishonesty is the truth. And it is certainly the case that poor Irish people suffered horrific, gruesome treatment – including transportation to the British colonies. The application of this policy in Ireland was essentially a radical and colonial extension of the English Poor Law of 1601, which provided relief for those unable to work but also sought to impose social control by criminalising adult “idleness” and vagabondage.

In 1619 the spirit of this law was invoked to ship 100 destitute children from the streets of London to Virginia. In theory those that survived the journey were required to be apprentices for seven years. The mortality rate in Virginia was exceptionally high for colonists at this time due to disease and hard labour and it is unknown how many of these transported children survived into adulthood. In November 1619 the Virginia Company requested that another hundred children be sent from London but this time the minimum age was set at 12 years.

In 1620, the Virginia Company was granted authority by the Privy Council to coerce the “obstinate” into going. Similar orders for poor children to be sent to Virginia as “apprentices” were fulfilled throughout the 1620s and the illegal “spiriting” of children from the metropole continued into the 18th century.

The most significant forced movement of Irish people into the colonies, however, occurred under Oliver Cromwell’s “protectorate”. After his scouring of Ireland during the Civil War, which raged across the whole of the archipelago, the Lord Protector gave a personal assurance to the Irish people in 1650 that only those “ready to run to arms by the instigation of their Clergy or otherwise” would be at risk of being sent to the “Tobacco islands”.

But the focus and scope of transportation changed dramatically in 1653. It expanded to include the poor, their destination was the American colonies, their fate was indentured servitude, and coercion was now the policy’s defining characteristic. The first order to transport the destitute from Ireland to the colonies was issued in July when the “overseers of precincts” were

“Authorised to treat with merchants for transporting vagrants into some English plantation in America, where the said persons may find livelihood and maintenance by their labour, and to deliver over the said persons to the said merchants accordingly…”

From 1653 to 1657 vagrants were specifically ordered to be transported to the West Indies from Tipperary, Waterford, Wexford, Kilkenny, Carlow, Galway, Limerick, Cork and Dublin. The order to ship “disorderly persons” from Ireland to the American colonies was rescinded by the Council of State in March 1657 because of its abuse by merchants. This was of little comfort to those already shipped across the Atlantic and sold into years of oppressive servitude and unpaid labour.

But the core legal and customary distinctions between servitude (as reserved for Europeans) and slavery (as reserved for “Negroes”) were fundamentally different. Colonial servitude was temporary, usually voluntary, and, although the courts were often tilted against them, the servant’s legal personhood was recognised. Colonial slavery was permanent, always involuntary, racialised and heritable. The uterine law ensured that the children of slaves inherited the status of their mother. Their children were perpetual slaves. Their children’s children were perpetual slaves. Slavery was social death with no way out.

Slaves were placed outside of common law and so they had no rights – not even the right to life. While there are accounts of servants being freed from their contracts early, after proving that they had been ill-treated by their master, we find the opposite provision for the enslaved. A slave, suffering perpetual bondage, could instead be subjected to an array of grotesque physical punishments such as castration, being burned alive, the mashing of their limbs leading to dismemberment, broken bones, beheadings, the beating out of eyes, slitting of ears and various other mutilations.

The Irish slaves meme, in truth, started as something else. It has been long established in Irish nationalist and Catholic historiography and was invoked by prominent Irish patriots such as Daniel O’Connell in 1843 and James Connolly in 1915. These narratives generally used a broad definition of slavery and, given the rhetorical import, obviously never took the time to mention that this “slavery” was indentured servitude, and that the customs and laws pertaining to slavery in the colonies did not apply to them.

The first prominent Irish historian to add wind to the sails of this narrative was JP Prendergast. In his classic 1865 work The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland he (credibly) claimed that 6,400 Irish people had been forcibly transported to the West Indies during the 1650s. In this influential work he drew an explicit analogy with the transatlantic slave trade: “Ireland must have exhibited scenes in every part like the slave hunts in Africa,” while describing Irish people being forced onto “slave ships” by “English slave dealers”.

Historians estimate that several thousand Irish people suffered forced transportation to the American colonies during the 1650s. In contrast, the transatlantic slave trade lasted centuries, was the largest forced migration in world history, involving tens of millions of African people, and its poisonous legacy remains in the form of anti-black racism. It is, indeed, this very racism which has powered efforts to make the admittedly awful treatment meted out to Irish servants into something even worse than slavery.

But the modern manifestation of this phenomenon is something else. This is not from people steeped in Irish nationalism or overwritten 19th-century histories. At the root of the Irish slaves lie is, for the most part, a single article: “The Irish Slave Trade – The Forgotten ‘White’ Slaves – The Slaves That Time Forgot” which was put together by the unknown – and possibly non-existent author – John Martin.

Martin invented an “Irish slave trade” that operated from 1625 to 1839 and claimed that “the Irish experienced the horrors of slavery as much (if not more in the 17th century) as the Africans did”.

He told readers that “Irish slaves” were treated “worse” and were “cheaper” than enslaved Africans. He also included a racist anti-miscegenation fantasy that English planters had forced Irish women to breed with enslaved African men and that this “forced breeding” practice “was stopped only because it interfered with the profits of a large slave transport company”.

The extremism of this article’s propaganda cannot be overstated. It makes blatantly false claims: “If a planter whipped or branded or beat an Irish slave to death, it was never a crime.” One particularly callous lie is the implication that “Irish slaves” were the victims of the Zong Massacre – an actual massacre of 132 Africans who were killed in cold blood by the crew so that their value could be claimed back from the ship’s insurers.

“Irish slaves” were, Martin claims, “burned alive and had their heads placed on pikes in the marketplace as a warning to other captives.” He surmised that Ireland was “the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants”, that “the majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white”, and that the term “indentured servitude” was part of a liberal conspiracy to cover up the history of “white slavery”.

Disturbingly, it was not just partisan social media accounts that were responsible for the rise in popularity of this racist ahistorical propaganda. For a number of years some mainstream outlets and celebrities promoted it as a “forgotten” history. For instance Irish Central, a popular Irish-American news website, pushed it forward.

Far from being an “expert”, however, ‘John Martin’ had almost entirely plagiarised the “facts” of his article from an ahistorical blog published by an Irish-American blogger named “Jungle” Jim Cavanaugh in 2003, and much of his work was based on a single book, Sean O’Callaghan’s To Hell or Barbados: The ethnic cleansing of Ireland.

In this text, O’Callaghan deliberately conflates racial slavery and indentured servitude over 100 times. He embellished his “Irish slaves” narrative by directly co-opting well known descriptions of the torture of enslaved Africans. He also fabricated lurid and pornographic tales of the rape of Irish female servants by enslaved Africans and the abuse of children by paedophile English planters.

Anatomy of a modern lie

All races and groups have been enslaved. What makes you so special? Quit whining about shit that never happened to you. You don't get to hijack the plights of historical people.

STFU. Jim Crow happened to me ***** and that was the white backlash for having to free us from slavery.

Can you post War and Peace? This one wasn’t long or boring enough. Don’t they still have indentured servitude in Africa? Maybe you could go there and help them Rerun.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[IM2]

**** it. It's time to shut mouths.

No, the Irish were not slaves in the Americas
March 16, 2018
By Eoin O'Carroll

Despite efforts to debunk the falsehood, the notion of 'Irish slaves' continues to circulate online, clouding discussions about racism and further complicating relations between Irish-Americans and African-Americans.

n America, St. Patrick's Day, which arrives on Saturday, means peak exposure to a particular class of assertion that Irish people charitably refer to as "blarney."

You might hear, for instance, that St. Patrick chased the snakes out of Ireland (they were never there in the first place), that the color historically associated with him is green (it's actually blue), that he evangelized with a four-leaf clover (three leaves, to represent the Trinity), or that an Irish monk “discovered” America 500 years before Columbus (utter bollocks).

These misconceptions are relatively harmless, as misconceptions go, but there's another one, strangling some online comment threads about racism like an invasive vine, that some historians have been working tirelessly to stamp out. It’s the claim that Irish people were slaves in the Americas, particularly the British West Indies, and that they were treated just as badly as – or worse than – their African counterparts.

“I conservatively estimate that tens of millions of people have been exposed to ‘Irish slaves’ disinformation in one form or another on social media,” says Liam Hogan, a research librarian in Limerick, Ireland, who has led efforts to debunk this myth. “These people, some of whom are Irish-American, are essentially digging up our ancestors’ bones and sharpening them into rhetorical weapons to use against people of color.”

Fueled by an influential 2001 book by Irish journalist Sean O’Callaghan titled “To Hell or Barbados,” the myth began propagating online in far-right circles in the past decade, eventually making its way into mainstream publications such as Scientific American, which corrected their article, and Daily Kos, which didn’t.

Today, you’ll find the claim popping up in comment threads on issues ranging from reparations to police brutality, where it is nearly always deployed as a way to criticize African-Americans and other nonwhites for being too vocal in their demands for social justice. “We were slaves too,” the typical comment goes, “and you don’t hear us complaining.”

No, the Irish were not slaves in the Americas

Start with your mouth, dude.

My mouth is speaking the truth. So it won't be shutting. And understand that it's not hate that's my problem. When a white piece of trash enters a thread that's about how Africa had just as much civilization as Europe and is filled with so much motherfucking hate that they cannot admit this even after being shown evidence, then tries to derail the thread by trying to denigrate the blacks providing the information then tries brining up a long debunked off topic racist meme, that's the person who needs to shut their motherfucking mouth. And that's what you have been doing saltine. So now it's time for me to shut your mouth.

So maggot would you and godboy like to show me how whites suffered from Apartheid in America after slavery was supposed to be illegal? Maybe you can show me the white civil rights act that came about after whites were oppressed by that same apartheid. Bring it mouth. Come on Mr. Big nuts. You sold the wolf ticket so I want what I paid for *****. Bring the facts saltine, don't go hiding in the Keebler treehouse.

 

[Godboy]

The white racist dumb ***** here are ignorant and have no factual knowledge of these issues.

Look, there is no similarity between indentured servitude and slavery. Let's just stop telling that lie. Indentured servitude was a contractual agreement . Irish historians say this.

Anatomy of a modern lie

• Nationalism is on the march, partly fuelled by partial or dishonest histories
• A particularly prevalent example is an invented ‘Irish slaves’ myth, which is very visible on social media
• One discredited book has been turned into racist propaganda by white nationalists on social media

By Liam Hogan

The debate over reparations for slavery is gathering pace in the United States, part of its great reckoning with its difficult problems with race. But one bad faith and ahistorical counterargument is once again coming to the fore on social media, usually appearing in the form: “the Irish were slaves, too: where are my reparations?”

This is the “Irish slaves” meme, a popular derailment tactic used increasingly by reactionaries since the Ferguson protests of 2014. This meme falsely equates the Irish American experience with racialised perpetual hereditary chattel slavery. It vandalises history to make the claim: “We were slaves, too, but we got over it, we’re not looking for handouts”.

It can be found in replies and in the comment sections beneath many of the news stories published on the Georgetown reparations, despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that it was two Irish Americans, Rev Thomas Mulledy and Rev William McSherry, who authorised and organised the original slave sales of the 1830s.

This is one of the great modern lies. It is popular and prevalent – and it is worth understanding how the perversion of the story of 17th-century transportation has gravitated to the centre of the racist culture wars of the early 21st century.

The place to start with grotesque dishonesty is the truth. And it is certainly the case that poor Irish people suffered horrific, gruesome treatment – including transportation to the British colonies. The application of this policy in Ireland was essentially a radical and colonial extension of the English Poor Law of 1601, which provided relief for those unable to work but also sought to impose social control by criminalising adult “idleness” and vagabondage.

In 1619 the spirit of this law was invoked to ship 100 destitute children from the streets of London to Virginia. In theory those that survived the journey were required to be apprentices for seven years. The mortality rate in Virginia was exceptionally high for colonists at this time due to disease and hard labour and it is unknown how many of these transported children survived into adulthood. In November 1619 the Virginia Company requested that another hundred children be sent from London but this time the minimum age was set at 12 years.

In 1620, the Virginia Company was granted authority by the Privy Council to coerce the “obstinate” into going. Similar orders for poor children to be sent to Virginia as “apprentices” were fulfilled throughout the 1620s and the illegal “spiriting” of children from the metropole continued into the 18th century.

The most significant forced movement of Irish people into the colonies, however, occurred under Oliver Cromwell’s “protectorate”. After his scouring of Ireland during the Civil War, which raged across the whole of the archipelago, the Lord Protector gave a personal assurance to the Irish people in 1650 that only those “ready to run to arms by the instigation of their Clergy or otherwise” would be at risk of being sent to the “Tobacco islands”.

But the focus and scope of transportation changed dramatically in 1653. It expanded to include the poor, their destination was the American colonies, their fate was indentured servitude, and coercion was now the policy’s defining characteristic. The first order to transport the destitute from Ireland to the colonies was issued in July when the “overseers of precincts” were

“Authorised to treat with merchants for transporting vagrants into some English plantation in America, where the said persons may find livelihood and maintenance by their labour, and to deliver over the said persons to the said merchants accordingly…”

From 1653 to 1657 vagrants were specifically ordered to be transported to the West Indies from Tipperary, Waterford, Wexford, Kilkenny, Carlow, Galway, Limerick, Cork and Dublin. The order to ship “disorderly persons” from Ireland to the American colonies was rescinded by the Council of State in March 1657 because of its abuse by merchants. This was of little comfort to those already shipped across the Atlantic and sold into years of oppressive servitude and unpaid labour.

But the core legal and customary distinctions between servitude (as reserved for Europeans) and slavery (as reserved for “Negroes”) were fundamentally different. Colonial servitude was temporary, usually voluntary, and, although the courts were often tilted against them, the servant’s legal personhood was recognised. Colonial slavery was permanent, always involuntary, racialised and heritable. The uterine law ensured that the children of slaves inherited the status of their mother. Their children were perpetual slaves. Their children’s children were perpetual slaves. Slavery was social death with no way out.

Slaves were placed outside of common law and so they had no rights – not even the right to life. While there are accounts of servants being freed from their contracts early, after proving that they had been ill-treated by their master, we find the opposite provision for the enslaved. A slave, suffering perpetual bondage, could instead be subjected to an array of grotesque physical punishments such as castration, being burned alive, the mashing of their limbs leading to dismemberment, broken bones, beheadings, the beating out of eyes, slitting of ears and various other mutilations.

The Irish slaves meme, in truth, started as something else. It has been long established in Irish nationalist and Catholic historiography and was invoked by prominent Irish patriots such as Daniel O’Connell in 1843 and James Connolly in 1915. These narratives generally used a broad definition of slavery and, given the rhetorical import, obviously never took the time to mention that this “slavery” was indentured servitude, and that the customs and laws pertaining to slavery in the colonies did not apply to them.

The first prominent Irish historian to add wind to the sails of this narrative was JP Prendergast. In his classic 1865 work The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland he (credibly) claimed that 6,400 Irish people had been forcibly transported to the West Indies during the 1650s. In this influential work he drew an explicit analogy with the transatlantic slave trade: “Ireland must have exhibited scenes in every part like the slave hunts in Africa,” while describing Irish people being forced onto “slave ships” by “English slave dealers”.

Historians estimate that several thousand Irish people suffered forced transportation to the American colonies during the 1650s. In contrast, the transatlantic slave trade lasted centuries, was the largest forced migration in world history, involving tens of millions of African people, and its poisonous legacy remains in the form of anti-black racism. It is, indeed, this very racism which has powered efforts to make the admittedly awful treatment meted out to Irish servants into something even worse than slavery.

But the modern manifestation of this phenomenon is something else. This is not from people steeped in Irish nationalism or overwritten 19th-century histories. At the root of the Irish slaves lie is, for the most part, a single article: “The Irish Slave Trade – The Forgotten ‘White’ Slaves – The Slaves That Time Forgot” which was put together by the unknown – and possibly non-existent author – John Martin.

Martin invented an “Irish slave trade” that operated from 1625 to 1839 and claimed that “the Irish experienced the horrors of slavery as much (if not more in the 17th century) as the Africans did”.

He told readers that “Irish slaves” were treated “worse” and were “cheaper” than enslaved Africans. He also included a racist anti-miscegenation fantasy that English planters had forced Irish women to breed with enslaved African men and that this “forced breeding” practice “was stopped only because it interfered with the profits of a large slave transport company”.

The extremism of this article’s propaganda cannot be overstated. It makes blatantly false claims: “If a planter whipped or branded or beat an Irish slave to death, it was never a crime.” One particularly callous lie is the implication that “Irish slaves” were the victims of the Zong Massacre – an actual massacre of 132 Africans who were killed in cold blood by the crew so that their value could be claimed back from the ship’s insurers.

“Irish slaves” were, Martin claims, “burned alive and had their heads placed on pikes in the marketplace as a warning to other captives.” He surmised that Ireland was “the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants”, that “the majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white”, and that the term “indentured servitude” was part of a liberal conspiracy to cover up the history of “white slavery”.

Disturbingly, it was not just partisan social media accounts that were responsible for the rise in popularity of this racist ahistorical propaganda. For a number of years some mainstream outlets and celebrities promoted it as a “forgotten” history. For instance Irish Central, a popular Irish-American news website, pushed it forward.

Far from being an “expert”, however, ‘John Martin’ had almost entirely plagiarised the “facts” of his article from an ahistorical blog published by an Irish-American blogger named “Jungle” Jim Cavanaugh in 2003, and much of his work was based on a single book, Sean O’Callaghan’s To Hell or Barbados: The ethnic cleansing of Ireland.

In this text, O’Callaghan deliberately conflates racial slavery and indentured servitude over 100 times. He embellished his “Irish slaves” narrative by directly co-opting well known descriptions of the torture of enslaved Africans. He also fabricated lurid and pornographic tales of the rape of Irish female servants by enslaved Africans and the abuse of children by paedophile English planters.

Anatomy of a modern lie

All races and groups have been enslaved. What makes you so special? Quit whining about shit that never happened to you. You don't get to hijack the plights of historical people.

STFU. Jim Crow happened to me ***** and that was the white backlash for having to free us from slavery.

Can you post War and Peace? This one wasn’t long or boring enough. Don’t they still have indentured servitude in Africa? Maybe you could go there and help them Rerun.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Slavery today is bigger than any other time in history. Africa is an awful place.

West African slavery lives on, 400 years after transatlantic trade began

 

[IM2]

The white racist dumb ***** here are ignorant and have no factual knowledge of these issues.

Look, there is no similarity between indentured servitude and slavery. Let's just stop telling that lie. Indentured servitude was a contractual agreement . Irish historians say this.

Anatomy of a modern lie

• Nationalism is on the march, partly fuelled by partial or dishonest histories
• A particularly prevalent example is an invented ‘Irish slaves’ myth, which is very visible on social media
• One discredited book has been turned into racist propaganda by white nationalists on social media

By Liam Hogan

The debate over reparations for slavery is gathering pace in the United States, part of its great reckoning with its difficult problems with race. But one bad faith and ahistorical counterargument is once again coming to the fore on social media, usually appearing in the form: “the Irish were slaves, too: where are my reparations?”

This is the “Irish slaves” meme, a popular derailment tactic used increasingly by reactionaries since the Ferguson protests of 2014. This meme falsely equates the Irish American experience with racialised perpetual hereditary chattel slavery. It vandalises history to make the claim: “We were slaves, too, but we got over it, we’re not looking for handouts”.

It can be found in replies and in the comment sections beneath many of the news stories published on the Georgetown reparations, despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that it was two Irish Americans, Rev Thomas Mulledy and Rev William McSherry, who authorised and organised the original slave sales of the 1830s.

This is one of the great modern lies. It is popular and prevalent – and it is worth understanding how the perversion of the story of 17th-century transportation has gravitated to the centre of the racist culture wars of the early 21st century.

The place to start with grotesque dishonesty is the truth. And it is certainly the case that poor Irish people suffered horrific, gruesome treatment – including transportation to the British colonies. The application of this policy in Ireland was essentially a radical and colonial extension of the English Poor Law of 1601, which provided relief for those unable to work but also sought to impose social control by criminalising adult “idleness” and vagabondage.

In 1619 the spirit of this law was invoked to ship 100 destitute children from the streets of London to Virginia. In theory those that survived the journey were required to be apprentices for seven years. The mortality rate in Virginia was exceptionally high for colonists at this time due to disease and hard labour and it is unknown how many of these transported children survived into adulthood. In November 1619 the Virginia Company requested that another hundred children be sent from London but this time the minimum age was set at 12 years.

In 1620, the Virginia Company was granted authority by the Privy Council to coerce the “obstinate” into going. Similar orders for poor children to be sent to Virginia as “apprentices” were fulfilled throughout the 1620s and the illegal “spiriting” of children from the metropole continued into the 18th century.

The most significant forced movement of Irish people into the colonies, however, occurred under Oliver Cromwell’s “protectorate”. After his scouring of Ireland during the Civil War, which raged across the whole of the archipelago, the Lord Protector gave a personal assurance to the Irish people in 1650 that only those “ready to run to arms by the instigation of their Clergy or otherwise” would be at risk of being sent to the “Tobacco islands”.

But the focus and scope of transportation changed dramatically in 1653. It expanded to include the poor, their destination was the American colonies, their fate was indentured servitude, and coercion was now the policy’s defining characteristic. The first order to transport the destitute from Ireland to the colonies was issued in July when the “overseers of precincts” were

“Authorised to treat with merchants for transporting vagrants into some English plantation in America, where the said persons may find livelihood and maintenance by their labour, and to deliver over the said persons to the said merchants accordingly…”

From 1653 to 1657 vagrants were specifically ordered to be transported to the West Indies from Tipperary, Waterford, Wexford, Kilkenny, Carlow, Galway, Limerick, Cork and Dublin. The order to ship “disorderly persons” from Ireland to the American colonies was rescinded by the Council of State in March 1657 because of its abuse by merchants. This was of little comfort to those already shipped across the Atlantic and sold into years of oppressive servitude and unpaid labour.

But the core legal and customary distinctions between servitude (as reserved for Europeans) and slavery (as reserved for “Negroes”) were fundamentally different. Colonial servitude was temporary, usually voluntary, and, although the courts were often tilted against them, the servant’s legal personhood was recognised. Colonial slavery was permanent, always involuntary, racialised and heritable. The uterine law ensured that the children of slaves inherited the status of their mother. Their children were perpetual slaves. Their children’s children were perpetual slaves. Slavery was social death with no way out.

Slaves were placed outside of common law and so they had no rights – not even the right to life. While there are accounts of servants being freed from their contracts early, after proving that they had been ill-treated by their master, we find the opposite provision for the enslaved. A slave, suffering perpetual bondage, could instead be subjected to an array of grotesque physical punishments such as castration, being burned alive, the mashing of their limbs leading to dismemberment, broken bones, beheadings, the beating out of eyes, slitting of ears and various other mutilations.

The Irish slaves meme, in truth, started as something else. It has been long established in Irish nationalist and Catholic historiography and was invoked by prominent Irish patriots such as Daniel O’Connell in 1843 and James Connolly in 1915. These narratives generally used a broad definition of slavery and, given the rhetorical import, obviously never took the time to mention that this “slavery” was indentured servitude, and that the customs and laws pertaining to slavery in the colonies did not apply to them.

The first prominent Irish historian to add wind to the sails of this narrative was JP Prendergast. In his classic 1865 work The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland he (credibly) claimed that 6,400 Irish people had been forcibly transported to the West Indies during the 1650s. In this influential work he drew an explicit analogy with the transatlantic slave trade: “Ireland must have exhibited scenes in every part like the slave hunts in Africa,” while describing Irish people being forced onto “slave ships” by “English slave dealers”.

Historians estimate that several thousand Irish people suffered forced transportation to the American colonies during the 1650s. In contrast, the transatlantic slave trade lasted centuries, was the largest forced migration in world history, involving tens of millions of African people, and its poisonous legacy remains in the form of anti-black racism. It is, indeed, this very racism which has powered efforts to make the admittedly awful treatment meted out to Irish servants into something even worse than slavery.

But the modern manifestation of this phenomenon is something else. This is not from people steeped in Irish nationalism or overwritten 19th-century histories. At the root of the Irish slaves lie is, for the most part, a single article: “The Irish Slave Trade – The Forgotten ‘White’ Slaves – The Slaves That Time Forgot” which was put together by the unknown – and possibly non-existent author – John Martin.

Martin invented an “Irish slave trade” that operated from 1625 to 1839 and claimed that “the Irish experienced the horrors of slavery as much (if not more in the 17th century) as the Africans did”.

He told readers that “Irish slaves” were treated “worse” and were “cheaper” than enslaved Africans. He also included a racist anti-miscegenation fantasy that English planters had forced Irish women to breed with enslaved African men and that this “forced breeding” practice “was stopped only because it interfered with the profits of a large slave transport company”.

The extremism of this article’s propaganda cannot be overstated. It makes blatantly false claims: “If a planter whipped or branded or beat an Irish slave to death, it was never a crime.” One particularly callous lie is the implication that “Irish slaves” were the victims of the Zong Massacre – an actual massacre of 132 Africans who were killed in cold blood by the crew so that their value could be claimed back from the ship’s insurers.

“Irish slaves” were, Martin claims, “burned alive and had their heads placed on pikes in the marketplace as a warning to other captives.” He surmised that Ireland was “the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants”, that “the majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white”, and that the term “indentured servitude” was part of a liberal conspiracy to cover up the history of “white slavery”.

Disturbingly, it was not just partisan social media accounts that were responsible for the rise in popularity of this racist ahistorical propaganda. For a number of years some mainstream outlets and celebrities promoted it as a “forgotten” history. For instance Irish Central, a popular Irish-American news website, pushed it forward.

Far from being an “expert”, however, ‘John Martin’ had almost entirely plagiarised the “facts” of his article from an ahistorical blog published by an Irish-American blogger named “Jungle” Jim Cavanaugh in 2003, and much of his work was based on a single book, Sean O’Callaghan’s To Hell or Barbados: The ethnic cleansing of Ireland.

In this text, O’Callaghan deliberately conflates racial slavery and indentured servitude over 100 times. He embellished his “Irish slaves” narrative by directly co-opting well known descriptions of the torture of enslaved Africans. He also fabricated lurid and pornographic tales of the rape of Irish female servants by enslaved Africans and the abuse of children by paedophile English planters.

Anatomy of a modern lie

All races and groups have been enslaved. What makes you so special? Quit whining about shit that never happened to you. You don't get to hijack the plights of historical people.

STFU. Jim Crow happened to me ***** and that was the white backlash for having to free us from slavery.

Can you post War and Peace? This one wasn’t long or boring enough. Don’t they still have indentured servitude in Africa? Maybe you could go there and help them Rerun.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Learn to read more than cartoons.

 

[IM2]

The white racist dumb ***** here are ignorant and have no factual knowledge of these issues.

Look, there is no similarity between indentured servitude and slavery. Let's just stop telling that lie. Indentured servitude was a contractual agreement . Irish historians say this.

Anatomy of a modern lie

• Nationalism is on the march, partly fuelled by partial or dishonest histories
• A particularly prevalent example is an invented ‘Irish slaves’ myth, which is very visible on social media
• One discredited book has been turned into racist propaganda by white nationalists on social media

By Liam Hogan

The debate over reparations for slavery is gathering pace in the United States, part of its great reckoning with its difficult problems with race. But one bad faith and ahistorical counterargument is once again coming to the fore on social media, usually appearing in the form: “the Irish were slaves, too: where are my reparations?”

This is the “Irish slaves” meme, a popular derailment tactic used increasingly by reactionaries since the Ferguson protests of 2014. This meme falsely equates the Irish American experience with racialised perpetual hereditary chattel slavery. It vandalises history to make the claim: “We were slaves, too, but we got over it, we’re not looking for handouts”.

It can be found in replies and in the comment sections beneath many of the news stories published on the Georgetown reparations, despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that it was two Irish Americans, Rev Thomas Mulledy and Rev William McSherry, who authorised and organised the original slave sales of the 1830s.

This is one of the great modern lies. It is popular and prevalent – and it is worth understanding how the perversion of the story of 17th-century transportation has gravitated to the centre of the racist culture wars of the early 21st century.

The place to start with grotesque dishonesty is the truth. And it is certainly the case that poor Irish people suffered horrific, gruesome treatment – including transportation to the British colonies. The application of this policy in Ireland was essentially a radical and colonial extension of the English Poor Law of 1601, which provided relief for those unable to work but also sought to impose social control by criminalising adult “idleness” and vagabondage.

In 1619 the spirit of this law was invoked to ship 100 destitute children from the streets of London to Virginia. In theory those that survived the journey were required to be apprentices for seven years. The mortality rate in Virginia was exceptionally high for colonists at this time due to disease and hard labour and it is unknown how many of these transported children survived into adulthood. In November 1619 the Virginia Company requested that another hundred children be sent from London but this time the minimum age was set at 12 years.

In 1620, the Virginia Company was granted authority by the Privy Council to coerce the “obstinate” into going. Similar orders for poor children to be sent to Virginia as “apprentices” were fulfilled throughout the 1620s and the illegal “spiriting” of children from the metropole continued into the 18th century.

The most significant forced movement of Irish people into the colonies, however, occurred under Oliver Cromwell’s “protectorate”. After his scouring of Ireland during the Civil War, which raged across the whole of the archipelago, the Lord Protector gave a personal assurance to the Irish people in 1650 that only those “ready to run to arms by the instigation of their Clergy or otherwise” would be at risk of being sent to the “Tobacco islands”.

But the focus and scope of transportation changed dramatically in 1653. It expanded to include the poor, their destination was the American colonies, their fate was indentured servitude, and coercion was now the policy’s defining characteristic. The first order to transport the destitute from Ireland to the colonies was issued in July when the “overseers of precincts” were

“Authorised to treat with merchants for transporting vagrants into some English plantation in America, where the said persons may find livelihood and maintenance by their labour, and to deliver over the said persons to the said merchants accordingly…”

From 1653 to 1657 vagrants were specifically ordered to be transported to the West Indies from Tipperary, Waterford, Wexford, Kilkenny, Carlow, Galway, Limerick, Cork and Dublin. The order to ship “disorderly persons” from Ireland to the American colonies was rescinded by the Council of State in March 1657 because of its abuse by merchants. This was of little comfort to those already shipped across the Atlantic and sold into years of oppressive servitude and unpaid labour.

But the core legal and customary distinctions between servitude (as reserved for Europeans) and slavery (as reserved for “Negroes”) were fundamentally different. Colonial servitude was temporary, usually voluntary, and, although the courts were often tilted against them, the servant’s legal personhood was recognised. Colonial slavery was permanent, always involuntary, racialised and heritable. The uterine law ensured that the children of slaves inherited the status of their mother. Their children were perpetual slaves. Their children’s children were perpetual slaves. Slavery was social death with no way out.

Slaves were placed outside of common law and so they had no rights – not even the right to life. While there are accounts of servants being freed from their contracts early, after proving that they had been ill-treated by their master, we find the opposite provision for the enslaved. A slave, suffering perpetual bondage, could instead be subjected to an array of grotesque physical punishments such as castration, being burned alive, the mashing of their limbs leading to dismemberment, broken bones, beheadings, the beating out of eyes, slitting of ears and various other mutilations.

The Irish slaves meme, in truth, started as something else. It has been long established in Irish nationalist and Catholic historiography and was invoked by prominent Irish patriots such as Daniel O’Connell in 1843 and James Connolly in 1915. These narratives generally used a broad definition of slavery and, given the rhetorical import, obviously never took the time to mention that this “slavery” was indentured servitude, and that the customs and laws pertaining to slavery in the colonies did not apply to them.

The first prominent Irish historian to add wind to the sails of this narrative was JP Prendergast. In his classic 1865 work The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland he (credibly) claimed that 6,400 Irish people had been forcibly transported to the West Indies during the 1650s. In this influential work he drew an explicit analogy with the transatlantic slave trade: “Ireland must have exhibited scenes in every part like the slave hunts in Africa,” while describing Irish people being forced onto “slave ships” by “English slave dealers”.

Historians estimate that several thousand Irish people suffered forced transportation to the American colonies during the 1650s. In contrast, the transatlantic slave trade lasted centuries, was the largest forced migration in world history, involving tens of millions of African people, and its poisonous legacy remains in the form of anti-black racism. It is, indeed, this very racism which has powered efforts to make the admittedly awful treatment meted out to Irish servants into something even worse than slavery.

But the modern manifestation of this phenomenon is something else. This is not from people steeped in Irish nationalism or overwritten 19th-century histories. At the root of the Irish slaves lie is, for the most part, a single article: “The Irish Slave Trade – The Forgotten ‘White’ Slaves – The Slaves That Time Forgot” which was put together by the unknown – and possibly non-existent author – John Martin.

Martin invented an “Irish slave trade” that operated from 1625 to 1839 and claimed that “the Irish experienced the horrors of slavery as much (if not more in the 17th century) as the Africans did”.

He told readers that “Irish slaves” were treated “worse” and were “cheaper” than enslaved Africans. He also included a racist anti-miscegenation fantasy that English planters had forced Irish women to breed with enslaved African men and that this “forced breeding” practice “was stopped only because it interfered with the profits of a large slave transport company”.

The extremism of this article’s propaganda cannot be overstated. It makes blatantly false claims: “If a planter whipped or branded or beat an Irish slave to death, it was never a crime.” One particularly callous lie is the implication that “Irish slaves” were the victims of the Zong Massacre – an actual massacre of 132 Africans who were killed in cold blood by the crew so that their value could be claimed back from the ship’s insurers.

“Irish slaves” were, Martin claims, “burned alive and had their heads placed on pikes in the marketplace as a warning to other captives.” He surmised that Ireland was “the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants”, that “the majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white”, and that the term “indentured servitude” was part of a liberal conspiracy to cover up the history of “white slavery”.

Disturbingly, it was not just partisan social media accounts that were responsible for the rise in popularity of this racist ahistorical propaganda. For a number of years some mainstream outlets and celebrities promoted it as a “forgotten” history. For instance Irish Central, a popular Irish-American news website, pushed it forward.

Far from being an “expert”, however, ‘John Martin’ had almost entirely plagiarised the “facts” of his article from an ahistorical blog published by an Irish-American blogger named “Jungle” Jim Cavanaugh in 2003, and much of his work was based on a single book, Sean O’Callaghan’s To Hell or Barbados: The ethnic cleansing of Ireland.

In this text, O’Callaghan deliberately conflates racial slavery and indentured servitude over 100 times. He embellished his “Irish slaves” narrative by directly co-opting well known descriptions of the torture of enslaved Africans. He also fabricated lurid and pornographic tales of the rape of Irish female servants by enslaved Africans and the abuse of children by paedophile English planters.

Anatomy of a modern lie

All races and groups have been enslaved. What makes you so special? Quit whining about shit that never happened to you. You don't get to hijack the plights of historical people.

STFU. Jim Crow happened to me ***** and that was the white backlash for having to free us from slavery.

Can you post War and Peace? This one wasn’t long or boring enough. Don’t they still have indentured servitude in Africa? Maybe you could go there and help them Rerun.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Slavery today is bigger than any other time in history. Africa is an awful place.

West African slavery lives on, 400 years after transatlantic trade began

Really?

‘Modern-day slavery’ on the rise in Europe: report

 

[Godboy]

The white racist dumb ***** here are ignorant and have no factual knowledge of these issues.

Look, there is no similarity between indentured servitude and slavery. Let's just stop telling that lie. Indentured servitude was a contractual agreement . Irish historians say this.

Anatomy of a modern lie

• Nationalism is on the march, partly fuelled by partial or dishonest histories
• A particularly prevalent example is an invented ‘Irish slaves’ myth, which is very visible on social media
• One discredited book has been turned into racist propaganda by white nationalists on social media

By Liam Hogan

The debate over reparations for slavery is gathering pace in the United States, part of its great reckoning with its difficult problems with race. But one bad faith and ahistorical counterargument is once again coming to the fore on social media, usually appearing in the form: “the Irish were slaves, too: where are my reparations?”

This is the “Irish slaves” meme, a popular derailment tactic used increasingly by reactionaries since the Ferguson protests of 2014. This meme falsely equates the Irish American experience with racialised perpetual hereditary chattel slavery. It vandalises history to make the claim: “We were slaves, too, but we got over it, we’re not looking for handouts”.

It can be found in replies and in the comment sections beneath many of the news stories published on the Georgetown reparations, despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that it was two Irish Americans, Rev Thomas Mulledy and Rev William McSherry, who authorised and organised the original slave sales of the 1830s.

This is one of the great modern lies. It is popular and prevalent – and it is worth understanding how the perversion of the story of 17th-century transportation has gravitated to the centre of the racist culture wars of the early 21st century.

The place to start with grotesque dishonesty is the truth. And it is certainly the case that poor Irish people suffered horrific, gruesome treatment – including transportation to the British colonies. The application of this policy in Ireland was essentially a radical and colonial extension of the English Poor Law of 1601, which provided relief for those unable to work but also sought to impose social control by criminalising adult “idleness” and vagabondage.

In 1619 the spirit of this law was invoked to ship 100 destitute children from the streets of London to Virginia. In theory those that survived the journey were required to be apprentices for seven years. The mortality rate in Virginia was exceptionally high for colonists at this time due to disease and hard labour and it is unknown how many of these transported children survived into adulthood. In November 1619 the Virginia Company requested that another hundred children be sent from London but this time the minimum age was set at 12 years.

In 1620, the Virginia Company was granted authority by the Privy Council to coerce the “obstinate” into going. Similar orders for poor children to be sent to Virginia as “apprentices” were fulfilled throughout the 1620s and the illegal “spiriting” of children from the metropole continued into the 18th century.

The most significant forced movement of Irish people into the colonies, however, occurred under Oliver Cromwell’s “protectorate”. After his scouring of Ireland during the Civil War, which raged across the whole of the archipelago, the Lord Protector gave a personal assurance to the Irish people in 1650 that only those “ready to run to arms by the instigation of their Clergy or otherwise” would be at risk of being sent to the “Tobacco islands”.

But the focus and scope of transportation changed dramatically in 1653. It expanded to include the poor, their destination was the American colonies, their fate was indentured servitude, and coercion was now the policy’s defining characteristic. The first order to transport the destitute from Ireland to the colonies was issued in July when the “overseers of precincts” were

“Authorised to treat with merchants for transporting vagrants into some English plantation in America, where the said persons may find livelihood and maintenance by their labour, and to deliver over the said persons to the said merchants accordingly…”

From 1653 to 1657 vagrants were specifically ordered to be transported to the West Indies from Tipperary, Waterford, Wexford, Kilkenny, Carlow, Galway, Limerick, Cork and Dublin. The order to ship “disorderly persons” from Ireland to the American colonies was rescinded by the Council of State in March 1657 because of its abuse by merchants. This was of little comfort to those already shipped across the Atlantic and sold into years of oppressive servitude and unpaid labour.

But the core legal and customary distinctions between servitude (as reserved for Europeans) and slavery (as reserved for “Negroes”) were fundamentally different. Colonial servitude was temporary, usually voluntary, and, although the courts were often tilted against them, the servant’s legal personhood was recognised. Colonial slavery was permanent, always involuntary, racialised and heritable. The uterine law ensured that the children of slaves inherited the status of their mother. Their children were perpetual slaves. Their children’s children were perpetual slaves. Slavery was social death with no way out.

Slaves were placed outside of common law and so they had no rights – not even the right to life. While there are accounts of servants being freed from their contracts early, after proving that they had been ill-treated by their master, we find the opposite provision for the enslaved. A slave, suffering perpetual bondage, could instead be subjected to an array of grotesque physical punishments such as castration, being burned alive, the mashing of their limbs leading to dismemberment, broken bones, beheadings, the beating out of eyes, slitting of ears and various other mutilations.

The Irish slaves meme, in truth, started as something else. It has been long established in Irish nationalist and Catholic historiography and was invoked by prominent Irish patriots such as Daniel O’Connell in 1843 and James Connolly in 1915. These narratives generally used a broad definition of slavery and, given the rhetorical import, obviously never took the time to mention that this “slavery” was indentured servitude, and that the customs and laws pertaining to slavery in the colonies did not apply to them.

The first prominent Irish historian to add wind to the sails of this narrative was JP Prendergast. In his classic 1865 work The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland he (credibly) claimed that 6,400 Irish people had been forcibly transported to the West Indies during the 1650s. In this influential work he drew an explicit analogy with the transatlantic slave trade: “Ireland must have exhibited scenes in every part like the slave hunts in Africa,” while describing Irish people being forced onto “slave ships” by “English slave dealers”.

Historians estimate that several thousand Irish people suffered forced transportation to the American colonies during the 1650s. In contrast, the transatlantic slave trade lasted centuries, was the largest forced migration in world history, involving tens of millions of African people, and its poisonous legacy remains in the form of anti-black racism. It is, indeed, this very racism which has powered efforts to make the admittedly awful treatment meted out to Irish servants into something even worse than slavery.

But the modern manifestation of this phenomenon is something else. This is not from people steeped in Irish nationalism or overwritten 19th-century histories. At the root of the Irish slaves lie is, for the most part, a single article: “The Irish Slave Trade – The Forgotten ‘White’ Slaves – The Slaves That Time Forgot” which was put together by the unknown – and possibly non-existent author – John Martin.

Martin invented an “Irish slave trade” that operated from 1625 to 1839 and claimed that “the Irish experienced the horrors of slavery as much (if not more in the 17th century) as the Africans did”.

He told readers that “Irish slaves” were treated “worse” and were “cheaper” than enslaved Africans. He also included a racist anti-miscegenation fantasy that English planters had forced Irish women to breed with enslaved African men and that this “forced breeding” practice “was stopped only because it interfered with the profits of a large slave transport company”.

The extremism of this article’s propaganda cannot be overstated. It makes blatantly false claims: “If a planter whipped or branded or beat an Irish slave to death, it was never a crime.” One particularly callous lie is the implication that “Irish slaves” were the victims of the Zong Massacre – an actual massacre of 132 Africans who were killed in cold blood by the crew so that their value could be claimed back from the ship’s insurers.

“Irish slaves” were, Martin claims, “burned alive and had their heads placed on pikes in the marketplace as a warning to other captives.” He surmised that Ireland was “the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants”, that “the majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white”, and that the term “indentured servitude” was part of a liberal conspiracy to cover up the history of “white slavery”.

Disturbingly, it was not just partisan social media accounts that were responsible for the rise in popularity of this racist ahistorical propaganda. For a number of years some mainstream outlets and celebrities promoted it as a “forgotten” history. For instance Irish Central, a popular Irish-American news website, pushed it forward.

Far from being an “expert”, however, ‘John Martin’ had almost entirely plagiarised the “facts” of his article from an ahistorical blog published by an Irish-American blogger named “Jungle” Jim Cavanaugh in 2003, and much of his work was based on a single book, Sean O’Callaghan’s To Hell or Barbados: The ethnic cleansing of Ireland.

In this text, O’Callaghan deliberately conflates racial slavery and indentured servitude over 100 times. He embellished his “Irish slaves” narrative by directly co-opting well known descriptions of the torture of enslaved Africans. He also fabricated lurid and pornographic tales of the rape of Irish female servants by enslaved Africans and the abuse of children by paedophile English planters.

Anatomy of a modern lie

All races and groups have been enslaved. What makes you so special? Quit whining about shit that never happened to you. You don't get to hijack the plights of historical people.

STFU. Jim Crow happened to me ***** and that was the white backlash for having to free us from slavery.

Can you post War and Peace? This one wasn’t long or boring enough. Don’t they still have indentured servitude in Africa? Maybe you could go there and help them Rerun.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Slavery today is bigger than any other time in history. Africa is an awful place.

West African slavery lives on, 400 years after transatlantic trade began

Really?

‘Modern-day slavery’ on the rise in Europe: report

Do you want to compare numbers? I imagine you do not.

 

[IM2]

The white racist dumb ***** here are ignorant and have no factual knowledge of these issues.

Look, there is no similarity between indentured servitude and slavery. Let's just stop telling that lie. Indentured servitude was a contractual agreement . Irish historians say this.

Anatomy of a modern lie

• Nationalism is on the march, partly fuelled by partial or dishonest histories
• A particularly prevalent example is an invented ‘Irish slaves’ myth, which is very visible on social media
• One discredited book has been turned into racist propaganda by white nationalists on social media

By Liam Hogan

The debate over reparations for slavery is gathering pace in the United States, part of its great reckoning with its difficult problems with race. But one bad faith and ahistorical counterargument is once again coming to the fore on social media, usually appearing in the form: “the Irish were slaves, too: where are my reparations?”

This is the “Irish slaves” meme, a popular derailment tactic used increasingly by reactionaries since the Ferguson protests of 2014. This meme falsely equates the Irish American experience with racialised perpetual hereditary chattel slavery. It vandalises history to make the claim: “We were slaves, too, but we got over it, we’re not looking for handouts”.

It can be found in replies and in the comment sections beneath many of the news stories published on the Georgetown reparations, despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that it was two Irish Americans, Rev Thomas Mulledy and Rev William McSherry, who authorised and organised the original slave sales of the 1830s.

This is one of the great modern lies. It is popular and prevalent – and it is worth understanding how the perversion of the story of 17th-century transportation has gravitated to the centre of the racist culture wars of the early 21st century.

The place to start with grotesque dishonesty is the truth. And it is certainly the case that poor Irish people suffered horrific, gruesome treatment – including transportation to the British colonies. The application of this policy in Ireland was essentially a radical and colonial extension of the English Poor Law of 1601, which provided relief for those unable to work but also sought to impose social control by criminalising adult “idleness” and vagabondage.

In 1619 the spirit of this law was invoked to ship 100 destitute children from the streets of London to Virginia. In theory those that survived the journey were required to be apprentices for seven years. The mortality rate in Virginia was exceptionally high for colonists at this time due to disease and hard labour and it is unknown how many of these transported children survived into adulthood. In November 1619 the Virginia Company requested that another hundred children be sent from London but this time the minimum age was set at 12 years.

In 1620, the Virginia Company was granted authority by the Privy Council to coerce the “obstinate” into going. Similar orders for poor children to be sent to Virginia as “apprentices” were fulfilled throughout the 1620s and the illegal “spiriting” of children from the metropole continued into the 18th century.

The most significant forced movement of Irish people into the colonies, however, occurred under Oliver Cromwell’s “protectorate”. After his scouring of Ireland during the Civil War, which raged across the whole of the archipelago, the Lord Protector gave a personal assurance to the Irish people in 1650 that only those “ready to run to arms by the instigation of their Clergy or otherwise” would be at risk of being sent to the “Tobacco islands”.

But the focus and scope of transportation changed dramatically in 1653. It expanded to include the poor, their destination was the American colonies, their fate was indentured servitude, and coercion was now the policy’s defining characteristic. The first order to transport the destitute from Ireland to the colonies was issued in July when the “overseers of precincts” were

“Authorised to treat with merchants for transporting vagrants into some English plantation in America, where the said persons may find livelihood and maintenance by their labour, and to deliver over the said persons to the said merchants accordingly…”

From 1653 to 1657 vagrants were specifically ordered to be transported to the West Indies from Tipperary, Waterford, Wexford, Kilkenny, Carlow, Galway, Limerick, Cork and Dublin. The order to ship “disorderly persons” from Ireland to the American colonies was rescinded by the Council of State in March 1657 because of its abuse by merchants. This was of little comfort to those already shipped across the Atlantic and sold into years of oppressive servitude and unpaid labour.

But the core legal and customary distinctions between servitude (as reserved for Europeans) and slavery (as reserved for “Negroes”) were fundamentally different. Colonial servitude was temporary, usually voluntary, and, although the courts were often tilted against them, the servant’s legal personhood was recognised. Colonial slavery was permanent, always involuntary, racialised and heritable. The uterine law ensured that the children of slaves inherited the status of their mother. Their children were perpetual slaves. Their children’s children were perpetual slaves. Slavery was social death with no way out.

Slaves were placed outside of common law and so they had no rights – not even the right to life. While there are accounts of servants being freed from their contracts early, after proving that they had been ill-treated by their master, we find the opposite provision for the enslaved. A slave, suffering perpetual bondage, could instead be subjected to an array of grotesque physical punishments such as castration, being burned alive, the mashing of their limbs leading to dismemberment, broken bones, beheadings, the beating out of eyes, slitting of ears and various other mutilations.

The Irish slaves meme, in truth, started as something else. It has been long established in Irish nationalist and Catholic historiography and was invoked by prominent Irish patriots such as Daniel O’Connell in 1843 and James Connolly in 1915. These narratives generally used a broad definition of slavery and, given the rhetorical import, obviously never took the time to mention that this “slavery” was indentured servitude, and that the customs and laws pertaining to slavery in the colonies did not apply to them.

The first prominent Irish historian to add wind to the sails of this narrative was JP Prendergast. In his classic 1865 work The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland he (credibly) claimed that 6,400 Irish people had been forcibly transported to the West Indies during the 1650s. In this influential work he drew an explicit analogy with the transatlantic slave trade: “Ireland must have exhibited scenes in every part like the slave hunts in Africa,” while describing Irish people being forced onto “slave ships” by “English slave dealers”.

Historians estimate that several thousand Irish people suffered forced transportation to the American colonies during the 1650s. In contrast, the transatlantic slave trade lasted centuries, was the largest forced migration in world history, involving tens of millions of African people, and its poisonous legacy remains in the form of anti-black racism. It is, indeed, this very racism which has powered efforts to make the admittedly awful treatment meted out to Irish servants into something even worse than slavery.

But the modern manifestation of this phenomenon is something else. This is not from people steeped in Irish nationalism or overwritten 19th-century histories. At the root of the Irish slaves lie is, for the most part, a single article: “The Irish Slave Trade – The Forgotten ‘White’ Slaves – The Slaves That Time Forgot” which was put together by the unknown – and possibly non-existent author – John Martin.

Martin invented an “Irish slave trade” that operated from 1625 to 1839 and claimed that “the Irish experienced the horrors of slavery as much (if not more in the 17th century) as the Africans did”.

He told readers that “Irish slaves” were treated “worse” and were “cheaper” than enslaved Africans. He also included a racist anti-miscegenation fantasy that English planters had forced Irish women to breed with enslaved African men and that this “forced breeding” practice “was stopped only because it interfered with the profits of a large slave transport company”.

The extremism of this article’s propaganda cannot be overstated. It makes blatantly false claims: “If a planter whipped or branded or beat an Irish slave to death, it was never a crime.” One particularly callous lie is the implication that “Irish slaves” were the victims of the Zong Massacre – an actual massacre of 132 Africans who were killed in cold blood by the crew so that their value could be claimed back from the ship’s insurers.

“Irish slaves” were, Martin claims, “burned alive and had their heads placed on pikes in the marketplace as a warning to other captives.” He surmised that Ireland was “the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants”, that “the majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white”, and that the term “indentured servitude” was part of a liberal conspiracy to cover up the history of “white slavery”.

Disturbingly, it was not just partisan social media accounts that were responsible for the rise in popularity of this racist ahistorical propaganda. For a number of years some mainstream outlets and celebrities promoted it as a “forgotten” history. For instance Irish Central, a popular Irish-American news website, pushed it forward.

Far from being an “expert”, however, ‘John Martin’ had almost entirely plagiarised the “facts” of his article from an ahistorical blog published by an Irish-American blogger named “Jungle” Jim Cavanaugh in 2003, and much of his work was based on a single book, Sean O’Callaghan’s To Hell or Barbados: The ethnic cleansing of Ireland.

In this text, O’Callaghan deliberately conflates racial slavery and indentured servitude over 100 times. He embellished his “Irish slaves” narrative by directly co-opting well known descriptions of the torture of enslaved Africans. He also fabricated lurid and pornographic tales of the rape of Irish female servants by enslaved Africans and the abuse of children by paedophile English planters.

Anatomy of a modern lie

All races and groups have been enslaved. What makes you so special? Quit whining about shit that never happened to you. You don't get to hijack the plights of historical people.

STFU. Jim Crow happened to me ***** and that was the white backlash for having to free us from slavery.

Nothing happened to you. Here you are, shouting your foul opinions to the world. Not a single white man is stopping you. Ain't freedom great?

I think I can speak better to what I have faced than you can boy. Turn black then tell me what hasn't happened.

 

[IM2]

All races and groups have been enslaved. What makes you so special? Quit whining about shit that never happened to you. You don't get to hijack the plights of historical people.

STFU. Jim Crow happened to me ***** and that was the white backlash for having to free us from slavery.

Can you post War and Peace? This one wasn’t long or boring enough. Don’t they still have indentured servitude in Africa? Maybe you could go there and help them Rerun.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Slavery today is bigger than any other time in history. Africa is an awful place.

West African slavery lives on, 400 years after transatlantic trade began

Really?

‘Modern-day slavery’ on the rise in Europe: report

Do you want to compare numbers? I imagine you do not.

The fact is that slavery goes on in Europe and it's not a small number.

Now would you like to compare the number of white countries colonized by African nations to the countries colonized by European ones?

 

[Asclepias]

Our arguments are supported by the facts we have shown to your face. The fantasy is your argument. Well actually it's more like a delusion. You've been shown that everything you have believed in your life is a lie. Instead of accepting the facts, you want to flail and kick like a 3 year old when it's told it can't have something. Your entire life has been fake news son.

More propaganda and bullshit. The only reason they died is because they didnt want the south to start enslaving white men. If they were so worried about Black people being free why did they allow slavery to still exist in the north?

Hmmm....Slavery did not exist in the Northern States...at the time of the Civil War. I doubt any whites were worried about being enslaved..perhaps you could shoot me a link from that time bemoaning the possibility? I will note that the shameful Dred/Scot decision did recognize the right for Southern slave-owners to pursue their "property" all the way to the Canadian border.

Dred Scott

"The decision of the court was read in March of 1857. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney -- a staunch supporter of slavery -- wrote the "majority opinion" for the court. It stated that because Scott was black, he was not a citizen and therefore had no right to sue. The decision also declared the Missouri Compromise of 1820, legislation which restricted slavery in certain territories, unconstitutional.

While the decision was well-received by slaveholders in the South, many northerners were outraged. The decision greatly influenced the nomination of Abraham Lincoln to the Republican Party and his subsequent election, which in turn led to the South's secession from the Union.

Peter Blow's sons, childhood friends of Scott, had helped pay Scott's legal fees through the years. After the Supreme Court's decision, the former master's sons purchased Scott and his wife and set them free.

Dred Scott died nine months later."

A lot of the troops on the Northern side hated slavery..and thought the blacks were totally inferior. They hated the Institution---that's all. Some for religious reasons..some economic...some ethical...some because they were told to by the media of the day. Many of the Northern soldiers were Irish immigrants..who were as racist as the day is long..but they were drafted..so they had no choice-they fought. Most soldiers don't fight for great causes..they fight for their buddy next to them..and to not seem a coward.

With a handful of exceptions...everyone of that time was racist by our standard....even the advocates for Emancipation

Of course slavery existed in the North at the time of the civil war...at least unofficially. During those times abolitionists realized they would need something to get whites to fight the south. Claiming white people were being enslaved by the south and using picuters of mullatto children that appeared white woke whites up.

White slave propaganda - Wikipedia

"White slave propaganda is the term given to publicity, especially photograph and woodcuts, and also novels, articles, and popular lectures, about mixed-race, white-looking slaves, which was used during and prior to the American Civil War to further the abolitionist cause and to raise money for the education of former slaves. The images included children with predominantly European-American features photographed alongside dark-skinned adult slaves with typically African-American features. It was intended to shock the viewing audiences with a reminder that slaves shared their humanity, and evidence that slaves did not belong in the category of the "Other"."

There were also public statements by pro-slavery activists who wanted slavery legalized nationwide, overruling state prohibitions, and that there was no reason why slavery was limited to blacks. According to them, Northern white laborers would have better lives as slaves."

See how much fact white people leave out when they want to appear glorious and human? Not many people know about this.

 

[Asclepias]

Our arguments are supported by the facts we have shown to your face. The fantasy is your argument. Well actually it's more like a delusion. You've been shown that everything you have believed in your life is a lie. Instead of accepting the facts, you want to flail and kick like a 3 year old when it's told it can't have something. Your entire life has been fake news son.

More propaganda and bullshit. The only reason they died is because they didnt want the south to start enslaving white men. If they were so worried about Black people being free why did they allow slavery to still exist in the north?

Hmmm....Slavery did not exist in the Northern States...at the time of the Civil War. I doubt any whites were worried about being enslaved..perhaps you could shoot me a link from that time bemoaning the possibility? I will note that the shameful Dred/Scot decision did recognize the right for Southern slave-owners to pursue their "property" all the way to the Canadian border.

Dred Scott

"The decision of the court was read in March of 1857. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney -- a staunch supporter of slavery -- wrote the "majority opinion" for the court. It stated that because Scott was black, he was not a citizen and therefore had no right to sue. The decision also declared the Missouri Compromise of 1820, legislation which restricted slavery in certain territories, unconstitutional.

While the decision was well-received by slaveholders in the South, many northerners were outraged. The decision greatly influenced the nomination of Abraham Lincoln to the Republican Party and his subsequent election, which in turn led to the South's secession from the Union.

Peter Blow's sons, childhood friends of Scott, had helped pay Scott's legal fees through the years. After the Supreme Court's decision, the former master's sons purchased Scott and his wife and set them free.

Dred Scott died nine months later."

A lot of the troops on the Northern side hated slavery..and thought the blacks were totally inferior. They hated the Institution---that's all. Some for religious reasons..some economic...some ethical...some because they were told to by the media of the day. Many of the Northern soldiers were Irish immigrants..who were as racist as the day is long..but they were drafted..so they had no choice-they fought. Most soldiers don't fight for great causes..they fight for their buddy next to them..and to not seem a coward.

With a handful of exceptions...everyone of that time was racist by our standard....even the advocates for Emancipation

There were still slaves in the north. Not many, but some. They were grandfathered as part of the freeing of slaves in the north.

Indentured servitude was slavery. Just a type that you could buy your way out of. Many never did.

I have read that indentured servants were treated horribly.

Not as horribly as the enslaved. There is a big difference in knowing you can...

A. Buy your way out of servitude or work off the debt.
B. rest easy realizing your children wont have to deal with this. Knowing this was not going to affect your children.
C. Knowing that if you decide to escape youre just another white person.